Steve Sanders says his website, which features listings of lots nationwide, is like none other

As an attorney and developer, Steve Sanders already wore many hats.

Now he has a new one: website 
developer.

After coming to Charlotte from Washington, D.C., in 2001, he formed the Sandstone Group in 2003, carrying on his family’s tradition of commercial and residential real estate development. But a year and a half ago, he said, he noticed the need for a website to help developers and builders across the country find developed and undeveloped land.

Last month, Sanders, managing director for Sandstone Group, and his wife, Erin, launched lotnetwork.com.

You’re involved in a lot of things. It all fits together. When I practiced law, I did all transactional work for the most part, corporate, finance and large real 
estate and real estate finance transactions. That transitioned to development. My dad was in commercial real estate in Columbia and has done development for a number of years, so I kind of grew up seeing that. Part of my motivation for going to law school was getting a good background that would be useful if I transitioned into development, which I did. It has been very useful. Then we 
really saw the need for what we have 
created with lotnetwork.com. As developers, we saw that no one was addressing this, amazingly, anywhere.

What makes lotnetwork.com different from other real estate websites? There’s MLS that does homes. There are commercial sites like CoStar and LoopNet that do office buildings and leasing for office buildings. And there are some land websites, but they are very clearly marketed towards ranches (and) farms, and the content on there is driven toward selling farmland and what you can do with your farms. None of them are focused on the residential land and lot industry, which is our sole focus. We don’t take house listings. We don’t have fields where people can input how many square feet the house is and how many bathrooms it has. We don’t take commercial listings. To the 
extent there is any overlap, there may be a parcel of land that someone has a farm on today, but it may be a development 
tomorrow. There are some sites that maybe do Minnesota lots, but there is nothing that has what we have, which is over 250,000 listings nationwide so far

How do you start a website with more than 250,000 listings? We work with an industry partner that basically pulls all this data and has relationships with MLSes across the nation. It allows us to get this information. And we are the only ones who get this narrowed focus of lots and lands out of the 
information that they have.

Before you launched the site, were you worried that someone else would do it first? Yeah. Our schedule had us launching last year, but we hit a few hiccups. It’s a big project.

What were some of the hiccups? You’re dealing with very different skills and topics when you are building a 
website. It’s not that it was a stumbling block for us, but there was a lot to learn. That’s why having the right people 
working with us made all the difference. I am still learning. We are embracing 
social networking and social media. We chose to really embrace it because the 
development and real estate industry is really all about networking. That’s also been a learning curve, too, though. I’ve learned about social media that I didn’t know two years ago.

TARA RAMSEY can be reached at [email protected].

Steve Sanders

Lives in: Providence Plantation

Age: 42

Family: wife, Erin; children, 
Morgan, 9, Ryan, 7, and Brynn, 3

Education: bachelor’s in construction science and management, Clemson University, Clemson, S.C.;  juris 
doctorate, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C.