Consultants say FAR reductions could lower builder offers by tens of thousands; committee asks for per‑lot visualizations

RKG Associates presented revised fiscal and market modeling to the Large House Review Committee on Oct. 27, showing how stepped reductions in allowable livable square footage could change the price a builder would offer a homeowner and the town’s assessed‑value base.

Eric Halverson, principal at RKG Associates, told the committee the new analysis focused on differences by lot size: “The one thing that was missing from last time was looking at houses on different sized lots — what might the impact be to the sale price of someone looking to sell a house in the future as a result of potential zoning changes.” RKG used 202 teardown‑rebuild transactions from 2020–2025 as a principal sample, with smaller subsets for undersized (<9,500 sq ft, n=10), conforming (~10–11.5k sq ft, n≈22) and large (>12k sq ft, n≈23) lots.

The consultants described a stepwise approach to smoothing noisy price‑per‑square‑foot data across the reduction scenarios (labeled reduction 1, 1.5, 2 and 3) and then translating the change in livable area into an estimated…