What a TV Broker's AI Tool Reveals About Your Lot's Hidden Value

James Harris, the British-born luxury broker best known from seven seasons of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, is now running a real estate technology company called Breezy — and one of its features deserves the attention of any homeowner thinking about selling in the next year or two.

Harris, 42, stepped away from the Bravo series in 2021, the same year he purchased his current six-bedroom Italian-style estate in Los Angeles. He and his longtime business partner David Parnes went on to close somewhere between $800 million and $900 million in sales in the two years after the show ended, before splitting professionally in 2025. Since then, Harris has shifted a significant portion of his energy toward Breezy, a platform he co-founded to streamline the administrative side of real estate work for agents and homeowners alike.

The Tool That Answers the Question Developers Always Ask First

The Breezy feature most relevant to sellers is called Underbuilt Radar. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze a property's address against local zoning regulations and land data, then returns an immediate read on that property's development potential — including whether an accessory dwelling unit is permissible, what additions are possible, how large a structure can legally be, and what setbacks apply.

Harris told Realtor.com News that getting those answers used to require hours at a planning department office, calls to architects, and conversations with builders — all before a developer would even commit to a serious look at a property. Breezy's tool, he says, compresses that process to seconds. As of mid-2026, the product covers 28,000 ZIP codes across roughly 9,000 cities, including Los Angeles. Harris says he has personally run the tool on every home he has purchased over the past eight years.

The significance here is not celebrity gossip. It is that a luxury agent with decades of experience transacting at the highest end of the market identified development potential as one of the first questions serious buyers ask — and built a product specifically to surface it faster.

Why Sellers Should Run This Kind of Analysis Before Setting a List Price

Most sellers price their homes based on comparable sales: what similar finished homes nearby have sold for. That is the right starting point, but it is not the complete picture for a buyer who sees your lot as a platform for something larger.

Developers, investors, and even owner-occupants who want to add a rental unit or expand a footprint routinely pay a premium above the pure residential comparable value when zoning allows it. If your property sits in a zone that permits an ADU, a vertical addition, or a larger total buildable area than what currently exists, that fact has monetary value — and if you do not know it, you cannot negotiate for it.

Sellers who go to market without understanding their lot's development envelope are, in effect, leaving that analysis to the buyer. Buyers will use it. Their offers will reflect it, but the savings will go into the buyer's pocket, not yours.

This is not a niche consideration limited to large parcels or commercial-adjacent properties. In dense urban and suburban markets — exactly the kinds of markets where Breezy has deployed its coverage — zoning rules have shifted substantially over the past several years, particularly around ADU permissions. A property that was not ADU-eligible five years ago may be now. Sellers relying on stale assumptions about what their land can do are operating on incomplete information.

How to Incorporate Development Potential Into Your Selling Strategy

You do not need a proprietary AI platform to start this process. Here is what a well-prepared seller should do before listing:

• Pull your current zoning designation from your local planning or building department. This is public record.
• Ask your city or county planning office specifically about ADU eligibility, maximum lot coverage, and any recent upzoning that affects your parcel. Many jurisdictions have updated these rules since 2020.
• Have a licensed architect or contractor give you a rough sense of what additions are physically and legally possible. Even a one-hour consultation can surface information that changes how you present the property.
• Work with your listing agent to identify whether developer or investor buyers have been active in your submarket. If they have, your marketing materials and pricing strategy should explicitly address land potential, not just the finished home.
• Consider getting a formal development feasibility analysis if your lot is large, oddly shaped, or in an area with recent zoning changes. The cost is modest relative to what it might add to your negotiating position.

The broader lesson from what Harris has built is that data which used to take days to assemble is becoming available in seconds. Sophisticated buyers — and the agents representing them — will arrive at your negotiating table with this information already in hand. The seller who has done the same homework does not get surprised; the seller who has not get outmaneuvered.

If you want a quick baseline on what your property might be worth to a buyer today — development potential included — running it through an instant-offer tool is a reasonable first step before you commit to a list price or an agent.