Site control, title, and the diligence clocks — New Hampshire

One agency, and a site-control threshold that asks for almost nothing

The same structural inversion that drives LIHTC everywhere applies here: the tax credit equity that pays for the land doesn't exist until an award does, so a developer almost never closes on a New Hampshire site before winning a reservation. But New Hampshire doesn't split that problem across three regulators the way California does (CTCAC, CDLAC, HCD) or run two parallel clocks the way Texas does (TDHCA plus the Bond Review Board). New Hampshire Housing Finance Authority — "NH Housing," created under RSA Chapter 204-C — is the state's sole LIHTC allocating agency for both 9% and 4% credits.

Its site-control threshold is two sentences. HFA 109.06.F reads in full: "Applicant must have secure site control. Site control may be in the form of an executed Option to Purchase, Agreement to Enter into a Lease, or other legal form of site control." There is no minimum term specified anywhere in the QAP's own text, no extension-ladder requirement, and no execution-date freshness window — nothing resembling CTCAC's evidence-of-executed-extensions rule or Texas's itemized 45-year-minimum-lease list.

That brevity is easy to misread as "site control barely matters here." It doesn't mean that — it means NH Housing defers the actual verification of site control downstream, checking it independently at three later checkpoints instead of loading requirements onto the application. The next section is where those checkpoints actually live.

The annual calendar you're racing, and where a cure period actually exists

Unlike CTCAC's near-zero tolerance for late or missing threshold documents, HFA 109.05.C lets NH Housing, at its sole discretion, permit an applicant to immediately correct minor defects using a cure-period provision published in the Preliminary and Final Application Process Summary. That's a real, structural difference from California's regime. But a cure period fixes a defect in something submitted — it does not manufacture a document nobody ordered. The published exhibit list is still the actual gate.

The real diligence package arrives after you've already won — not before

Because the application itself asks for so little, the diligence documents California and Texas developers assemble before submitting show up in New Hampshire only after a reservation is already in hand, at three separate checkpoints in the QAP's appendices.

The Progress Phase intro is explicit that missing these deadlines is not a soft failure: extensions are granted only "upon written request, and with good cause," at NH Housing's sole discretion, and "the tax credit reservation may be rescinded at the sole discretion of NH Housing for not meeting the progress phase requirements."

Site control gets checked twice more after that. Appendix B (Carryover Allocation Requirements, documents due by October 1 of the credit year) requires B.4, evidence of continued site control, again unless the property was already owned and deeded at application. Appendix C (Final Allocation Requirements — issuance of IRS Form 8609) requires C.11, a copy of the recorded deed or "comparable recorded site control." None of the three checkpoints (A.7, B.4, C.11) carries a QAP-specified freshness window of its own — the discipline this creates isn't clock math the way California's three title-report deadlines are, it's making sure the underlying option or PSA's own expiration date is engineered to survive all three dates on a single deal.

Title insurance is NH Housing's own job here — the survey is yours

Underwriting Standards Section 5.05.C states it in one line: "NH Housing's general counsel will handle all title insurance policy work." There is no QAP-set title-report freshness clock to track at all — nothing like California's simultaneous 90-day CTCAC / 90-day CDLAC / 30-day HCD MHP windows, and nothing like Texas's single six-month-with-bring-down-letter rule. A separate summary of closing insurance requirements is posted on NH Housing's website, and detailed requirements live in the project's regulatory agreement, but the QAP and underwriting standards do not publish a numeric deadline for how current a title report or commitment must be.

That absence is not the same as title diligence not mattering. A construction lender and an equity investor will still want their own current title work on their own schedule, and NH Housing's general-counsel process still has to clear before closing — it just means there is no state-published clock for a tool to enforce here the way there is in California or Texas.

The survey requirement, by contrast, is entirely the developer's. Underwriting Standards Section 5.06.C requires a site survey performed by a New Hampshire-licensed land surveyor for every property, and the standard is functional rather than a citation to a national convention: the survey and its affidavit must meet whatever is necessary to remove the survey exception from the title insurance policy. NH Housing spells out its own required elements — a north arrow, a legend, every building located, all easements burdening or appurtenant to the property, a complete metes-and-bounds boundary survey, springs/ponds/lakes/streams/rivers on or bordering the property, existing utilities, and "any other matters revealed by the title search" — rather than referencing ALTA/NSPS Table A items by name the way both the California and Texas practice does.

Appraisal sets a price ceiling, and who orders it depends on who's lending

Underwriting Standards Section 5.06.A: "Acquisition costs which exceed the appraised value are generally not eligible to be financed using NH Housing funds, except under extenuating circumstances with NH Housing approval. The acquisition price is limited to the lesser of the sale price or appraised value." The appraisal itself must comply with USPAP. Who commissions it depends on what NH Housing is providing: when NH Housing is the long-term amortizing first-mortgage lender, NH Housing commissions the appraisal directly; when it's only providing a deferred payment loan or construction financing, it relies on the report the long-term lender commissioned, provided NH Housing is listed as an interested party or intended user.

This is a different kind of rule than California's appraisal-date-versus-site-control-execution-date window. NH Housing's rule isn't a timing window at all — it's a price ceiling. The check a tool needs to run in New Hampshire is not "is the appraisal dated within X days of the option," it's "does the acquisition line in the development budget exceed the appraised value," and that check applies to every acquisition NH Housing finances, not only identity-of-interest transactions.

Two Phase I clocks, for two different purposes, that do not agree with each other

Underwriting Standards Section 5.06.B makes a Phase I Environmental Site Assessment mandatory for every NH Housing-financed project, conforming to "the most recent edition of the ASTM Standard Practice for Environmental Site Assessments: Phase I ESA Process" — a forward-looking reference rather than naming a specific edition that can go stale on the page.

The five components that must be refreshed in that update letter — interviews with past and present owners/operators/occupants, searches for recorded environmental cleanup liens, review of federal/tribal/state/local government records, visual inspection of the facility and adjoining properties, and the environmental professional's declaration — are lifted almost verbatim from the federal All Appropriate Inquiries rule's own refresh list at 40 CFR §§ 312.23, 312.25, 312.26, 312.27, and 312.21. That's a genuinely different design choice than California's: CTCAC's separate 12-month clock (keyed to the application deadline) and the federal AAI clock (keyed to the acquisition date) routinely diverge in California's own guide. In New Hampshire, NH Housing built its financing-currency test directly out of AAI's own 180-day/1-year windows, so there is only one clock to track for this purpose, not two that quietly drift apart.

That one clock is not, however, the only Phase I clock running on a New Hampshire deal. Separately, at application, the QAP's Advanced Projects scoring category (HFA 109.07) awards 3 bonus points for "Phase 1 Environmental completed," and its own documentation column defines that as a report "dated within five years" — but adds, in the same cell, that "a new Phase 1 ESA will be required if the project receives a reservation." So a five-year-old report can legitimately earn scoring points at application and still be entirely unusable nine months later at Progress Phase under the one-year financing-currency test. The two clocks are never reconciled anywhere in the QAP text — treat them as serving two different purposes, not as the same requirement stated twice.

There is also a third, state-agency-driven environmental step that happens automatically and is easy to conflate with the developer's own Phase I: under HFA 109.05.A, submitting a preliminary application and letter of intent for a 9% round triggers NH Housing itself to commission an abbreviated HUD Environmental Checklist from a third-party professional it selects, at a fee payable directly to that vendor. Any issues the checklist raises must be discussed with NH Housing staff. It is a narrower screening tool with its own separate fee, not a substitute for the developer's own Phase I ESA.

Federal money layers its own review on top of all of this. For HOME-, Project-Based Voucher-, or FHA Risk Share-funded projects, the appropriate 24 CFR Part 58 HUD Environmental Checklist must be submitted to HUD (by NH Housing) for a release of funds before loan closing can occur — the same choice-limiting-activity logic California and Texas both face. Federal Housing Trust Fund money runs a separate environmental review under 24 CFR § 93.301(f) that, per NH Housing's own standards, does not require a release of funds from HUD.

Local site plan approval has its own finality test — "approved" can still mean "not done"

Threshold A, HFA 109.06.A, requires the proposed project to have been granted site plan approval before final application. That takes more than a Notice of Decision: the applicant must also submit a permit-status letter from the project engineer or sponsor's attorney confirming the approval meets the requirements of RSA 676:4, I(i), naming the dates each separate local approval (Planning, Zoning, Historical, Conservation, and/or other) was granted, and narrating how any conditions — including expiration — were satisfied.

RSA 676:4, I(i) governs when a conditionally-approved plat or site plan actually becomes final. It becomes final, without a further public hearing, only once every condition falls into one of a narrow set of categories — minor administrative plan modifications, other conditions requiring no discretionary board judgment, or conditions tied to obtaining a permit or approval from another government agency. Any condition outside those categories requires a full new public hearing with proper notice before the approval is final. A developer holding a locally-issued "conditional approval" that hasn't cleared that bar does not satisfy Threshold A, however confident the planning department sounds about it.

One drafting inconsistency worth flagging rather than treating as settled: the QAP's own table of contents still lists a standalone "K. Environment" threshold subsection under HFA 109.06 Threshold Criteria. The body of the March 16, 2026 QAP has no such section — its actual subsection K is "Smoke Free Requirement." That means the current QAP has no standalone environmental threshold criterion at the application stage at all, only the automatically-commissioned HUD checklist and the optional Advanced Projects scoring bonus described above. Confirm this against whatever amendment, if any, follows before relying on it — a table of contents that hasn't caught up with the body text is a live artifact, not a citation.

New Hampshire land-use overlays that change what you can build, or what you owe at closing

The Land Use Change Tax is the least visible of these and the easiest to miss on a rural acquisition: a parcel's low assessed value on the tax card can be an artifact of its current-use enrollment, and the 10%-of-full-market-value bill lands the moment site work starts, not at closing — a cost that has to be underwritten into the acquisition budget, not discovered at the tax collector's office.

A buildable envelope that turns out to sit inside the 483-B protected-shoreland zone without anyone checking early enough is the New Hampshire equivalent of California's Alquist-Priolo trap: the 50-foot setback and 150-foot woodland buffer can remove enough developable land to break the unit count the pro forma was built on, and it surfaces late if the wetlands and shoreland checks aren't run before the design is set.

On relocation: NH Housing's Anti-Displacement and Relocation Policy (Underwriting Standards § 2.13) requires full compliance with the federal Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act for projects using HOME or Housing Trust Fund money, and a relocation plan plus all required tenant notices must be submitted with the application if any relocation is anticipated. The research behind this guide did not turn up a New Hampshire state-law relocation-assistance regime layered on top of federal URA the way California's Government Code § 7260 layers onto federal law generally for LIHTC deals — treat that as an open question to confirm with counsel on any occupied acquisition site, not as a settled "there is no such law."