Property Developer Operating System

One scheme, worked from first sighting to final distribution.

Most books on property development explain what the disciplines do. This one shows how they connect - and what each decision is worth in pounds.

A twenty-unit residential development on a former warehouse site runs through all thirty-two chapters. Its figures recur throughout: a Gross Development Value of £14,240,000, a total development cost of £10,326,500, a net developer profit of £2,563,000, and a cost of delay of £28,058 per week. Every figure is derived, every derivation is shown, and the running case is deliberately tested against its own evidence rather than presented as a clean success.

Written for two readers at once. Each chapter runs in two tiers. Foundations establishes the concepts for anyone new to development. Professional Practice applies them to the running case with the arithmetic worked in full, for anyone who already knows the ground.

What it covers. Finding and screening sites; due diligence and fatal flaws; planning strategy and viability; cost planning and commercial control; residual land valuation; development appraisal; structuring the capital stack; negotiating and completing acquisitions; procurement and construction contracts; programme, quality and building safety; handover and exit; and the business that repeats the process - its pipeline, its capital, its risks and its ethics.

Why it exists. Development goes wrong most often where two disciplines meet and neither understands what the other is carrying. The cost of that mutual ignorance is paid by investors in returns that arrive late, by project teams in programmes built on untested assumptions, by buyers in the price of homes, and by the industry in schemes that were never viable.

A developer who can state their finance cost as a percentage of value, their break-even, their peak working capital exposure and their delayed-case return is negotiating from evidence. One who cannot is negotiating from hope.

Includes a scheme data sheet, a terminology gateway, a formula reference, eight figures, and a full index.