The size of the building applied for is generally weakly related to the effort required for the application.

If you have some land, getting approval to build six buildings is often not much more work than getting approval to build one. So why not apply for six even if you only have a tenant for one. If it's the same amount of paperwork and the land is cheap (maybe you can lease the land to the farmer you bought it from).

This doesn't apply in places where land is expensive, of course. Central Amsterdam, downtown Manhattan, etc. In places like that you'd want to use your building permits PDQ.