Mike Mooney, chairman of MLG Capital and co-founder of MLG Companies, has spent decades “assembling” land. A land assemblage is the process of buying up parcels of land that are next to one another (also called “contiguous”) and merging them together into one larger piece. In Mike’s case, he needed that land for the 19 business parks and 43 subdivisions his company built, and for a four-square-mile parcel a large corporation hired him to put together.

Because land assemblages are risky, expensive, delicate operations, many people aren’t willing to chat about them on the record, so I was especially excited to meet someone who has so much experience and was willing to debrief me on decades of these land deals. He shared a number of war stories from rural land deals and also tips for urban assemblages that bring this complicated operation down to earth. Hope you get as much out of our conversation as I did!