Deal type
Phased lot sales
A subdivision does not operate, it sells inventory. The questions are how fast lots close, what each one releases from the loan when it does, and whether the phase you are about to start pays for itself. None of those are questions an income model can ask.
Lots, by phase, at a pace
Counts, front feet, price per lot and the premium some of them carry. A start month and a pace, so absorption is measured across the selling window rather than smeared over the hold.
- Escalation continuous or annual, anchored where you say and pinnable, so a price two years out is one you can defend.
- Closing costs charged twice over, deliberately: the buyer's at acquisition and the seller's on every lot that closes.
Builder takedown contracts
Put a phase or a set of lots under contract with a homebuilder and the contract re-dates and re-prices the lots it covers; the rest sell on the retail schedule.
- Earnest money credited per lot as each one closes, a minimum takedown every so many months, and a price on the contract’s own escalator: each lot’s list price, a $/lot or a $/SF.
- The builder walking, if you want to test it: the deposit kept and the lots not yet taken back on the retail market at a pace you set.
- A timeline in every contract: the signing and deposit, each takedown with the lots taken and the lots left, the default, and the sale.
- The goal seek and the sensitivity levers reach contract lots: price, escalator, timing and the phase levers move them too, so a deal sold to builders is never told a lever is out of reach.
The budget, and where it came from
One row per line item. Choose a method and quantity times unit price computes the amount, or edit the amount to back-solve the unit price. Each line draws over a window on a curve you pick.
- An engineer's cost PDF, imported. Parsed on the server, reconciled against the document's own subtotals, and staged. Nothing is written until you have looked at it.
- Cost per linear foot by section, with the phase each figure came from, because a rate quoted without its phase is a rate you cannot carry to the next deal.
- The budget by phase, and the month lot revenue overtakes spend, charted above the schedule from the same run.
- Land bought before it is entitled. Set the month approval is expected, and every lot sale and every line but the entitlement work waits for it, the whole program moving together. Entitlement Approval is a lever, so the goal seek and the margin of safety can say how late it can come.
- Excel paste and a CSV round trip on the schedule.
Release prices that actually release
A lot closes, a stated amount or a pro-rata share pays down the loan, and the balance the next month's interest is computed on is the one that survived. Outside debt service and outside the coverage ratio, because a paydown is not a payment.
- A mid-project refinance sized on the lots still to sell, at their plain sum or discounted to a bulk value the way an appraisal does, with the release price re-allocated over the ones the new loan secures.
- Interest capitalized into the budget, or funded as it accrues.
- A seller carry-back note beside the loan, or on its own: a share of the price the seller finances, interest paid or accrued, released per lot as the lots close and due in full at its maturity.
Including from the site
Land deals get underwritten standing in a field more often than sitting at a desk. Every table scrolls with a mirrored bar, every numeric field takes arithmetic, and the operator keys appear on a touch screen because a phone keypad has no multiply.
Each phase, as its own statement
Pick a phase and its cash flow reads like the project’s: its share of the land, its own budget lines, its share of the shared ones, its lots. Open any line to see what is in it; click any figure for where it comes from.
- Land and shared costs allocated by acreage, because a phase that does not carry its dirt cannot have an honest return.
- Notes and flags on a phase’s line are the same notes as on the project’s, so nothing is written twice.
Try it · the sixty-lot deal, running in this page
Honest
What it does not do
A page that only lists strengths is a page you have to check somewhere else.
- Approval is a date, not a probability. A deal that may never be approved is two underwritings, one with and one without, not one weighted between them.
- No vertical construction. This sells finished lots; a builder's homebuilding margin is a different model.
- A senior loan and a seller note, no mezzanine. A third position, or preferred equity in the capital stack, is not modeled.