Rancho San Carlos was one of the last of the original Spanish land grants in northern California that remained un-subdivided. Consisting of over 12,000 acres in the Monterey coastal range above the Carmel Highlands, the Ranch had been the focus of many legal battles between local conservationists and the owners who had development approvals to build over 300 luxury homes in a unique and exclusive resort setting. The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national land conservation organization, wanted to explore the possibility of creating a compromise that would keep some of the land open and available to the public while allowing a limited amount of development. TPL hoped to assemble a mix of funding sources to acquire either fee or conservation easements to transfer to an appropriate public agency or local land trust.
TPL retained EPS to create several alternative land use plans with varying amounts of development and mixes of private and public amenities. EPS estimated the residual land value of each alternative based on an estimate of the fair market value of the finished residential lots and basic infrastructure costs. The resulting analyses provided TPL and their project partners, the Big Sur Land Trust, with an approximation of how many conservation funds would need to be raised to acquire the open space resources.