October 2025 Blog | onCORE Origination
By Joseph Tassone Jr.
When I started doing site acquisition for wireless cell sites in the late 1990s, it was truly hands-on work and that foundation shaped everything I know today about real estate and property due diligence. There’s no better training than being out in the field, learning how land, people, and processes come together in real time.
Back then, our tools were limited and primitive by today’s standards. I remember learning to pull coordinates off a 7.5-minute USGS map using a “DB stick.” When I entered a new market, my first stop was AAA to pick up local paper maps. About a third of my time was spent in county courthouses digging through property records. If you wanted to understand zoning, you physically drove to each municipality, wrote a check, and walked out with a hard copy of their zoning ordinance.
As I write this, I realize that makes me sound old and maybe I am, but my point isn’t to say, “we had to walk to school uphill both ways.” It’s to emphasize how far we’ve come technologically, and how those advances will continue to sharpen our spears making us faster, more accurate, and more efficient than ever.
Despite the lack of tools, those early years taught me some of the most valuable lessons of my career: how to build relationships and negotiate with people. In those days, that often meant driving to a farmer’s house and sitting at the kitchen table for hours. Today, some of those same types of conversations happen over the phone or video, but the principle is the same. Whether face-to-face or voice-to-voice, it’s about building trust and understanding what matters most to the person on the other end. This human connection is the backbone of our industry, and our roles in it are invaluable.
What we lacked in speed, we made up for in understanding. Technology could never replace the trust built through genuine conversation.
The renewable-energy industry, at its core, is a real estate business. Ray Kroc, the visionary behind McDonald’s, once said, “We’re not in the hamburger business. We’re in the real estate business.” Likewise, in our world: we’re not just in the solar or BESS business, we’re in the real estate business.
You can have every digital tool and dataset in your arsenal, but if you can’t form genuine bonds with stakeholders, there isn’t a program on the planet that will convince a property owner to sign on the dotted line.
That said, technology is essential to what we do at onCORE. We use dozens of programs and platforms to evaluate sites and streamline processes. We’re constantly evaluating integrating new softwares and systems to improve speed and quality. Whether it’s GIS platforms, cold calling software, skip tracing databases or AI tools, it’s imperative to us that we always have the latest and greatest software for maximum efficiency, scale and diligence. Even in a data-driven world, though, the deal still closes human-to-human.
Just last week, one of our project managers, who has over two decades of real estate experience, spoke with a farmer in the Midwest. He had received 19 letters from different solar companies in the past 90 days and he was hesitant after being burned before. However, our PM’s personal touch, spending 45 minutes walking him through who our client was, what to expect, and how the process would work, made all the difference. A few days later, the owner signed a term sheet with our IPP customer.
Not every story ends so smoothly. Site acquisition is not for the faint of heart. Rejection is constant, and persistence is non-negotiable. Technology is evolving fast and if you don’t keep up, you’ll get left behind.
Still, no matter how sophisticated our tools become, this will always be a people business. Relationships still drive results. Trust, and your ability to build genuine bonds still seals the deal. And while technology can help us find the right door, it still takes a human being to introduce themselves and be invited in.
At onCORE, we combine technology and tenacity built on trusted relationships to deliver speed-to-site-control.
Joe Tassone Jr. is the founder and a principal of onCORE Origination with 30 years of project development experience and an expert in renewable energy development. Visit www.oncoreorig.com for more information.