The buyer’s seat, on day one

On the first day I ask a question that is not mine yet.

If I were the one taking this down at the end, would I?

Selling quickly gets treated as a marketing problem, solved at the end. It is a development decision, made at the beginning.

Lot width, home type, price band. The market sets those. A pro forma can propose them. It cannot decide them.

So I look for what is actually moving in that submarket, and then design the deal to deliver that.

I want the contractor in the room during diligence, too, while the numbers can still change something. Grading, utilities, offsites. Sometimes their number ends the deal. Sometimes it is what the price comes down by.

The expensive version of this is finding out at the end who was never going to buy it.