TestFit

Clifton Harness was an architect at a development company, and he was tired. Tired of drawing apartment units by hand. Tired of counting parking stalls, one rectangle at a time, on deal after deal that might never happen. "I hated drawing parking spaces manually as an architect," he later said, "and I figured the industry spent millions on that one task each year."

So in 2016 he called his college roommate, Ryan Griege, a software developer with a background in video games, and asked whether a program could do the job faster. The first version of what became TestFit had no interface at all. It was a command-line utility that printed building diagrams. It was not pretty. It solved a real problem.

Ten years later that command-line hack is a real estate feasibility platform used on more than 1,500 deals a week across roughly 150 companies in 35 states and a dozen countries. TestFit does not sell renderings. It sells answers - how many units fit, how much parking is required, what it costs, and whether the pro forma holds - to the people who decide whether a piece of land becomes a building.

That distinction is the whole business. In real estate development, the earliest question is also the most expensive to get wrong: what can we actually build here, and does the math work? For decades the answer came from an architect billing several weeks of studies. TestFit compresses that into minutes, which changes not just how fast a decision gets made but which decisions get made at all.

Feed TestFit a site, and its algorithms generate a buildable configuration: floorplates, unit mix, stair and elevator cores, road layouts, parking, area takeoffs and cost - all updating on the fly as a user drags a boundary or changes a constraint. The output is geometry and data, not marketing imagery, and that is deliberate.

The problem it attacks is optionality. Developers want to test many sites and many schemes, but manual feasibility is slow enough that most ideas never get evaluated. Bad deals survive too long; good deals move too slowly. By making a test fit cheap, TestFit lets teams kill weak sites early and prove strong ones fast.

Its customers are the people who live in that early stage: developers, architects, contractors, civil engineers, urban and city planners, brokers, universities and municipalities. One township planner reported cutting a full day of site modeling to fifteen minutes. An architecture firm credited it with winning fees on a deal it might otherwise have passed on.

And because feasibility is only the first step, TestFit exports its geometry directly into Revit (versions 2018 through 2026), SketchUp and AutoCAD - so when a deal is real, the work moves into design and documentation without being redrawn.