Day In The Life Of A Real Estate Developer (Finishing 8 Of 27 Units)

A day onsite finishing 8 of 27 units, from cabinets and fixtures upstairs to how we communicate with the team.

Fircrest was 28 townhomes. It is now 27, and the project is worth about $400,000 more because of it. This is a day on site at phase one, plus the redesign decision and the market read behind it.

The redesign: one fewer unit, $400,000 more value

The original plan was 20 units without garages plus eight with. Arthur reworked it and added 10 garage units in the back, giving up one unit to do it. Garage units carry about $40,000 more per door. Ten of those is $400,000 of added value against the loss of one unit’s worth of building, and no additional construction cost for the value created.

There is a strategy question underneath it. No-garage units do sell in this market, and they typically trade as multifamily, where a buyer rents them out and sells the building as a whole. Arthur is going the other way: condo converting and selling each unit separately, which is where garages earn their premium.

Phasing to offset risk

Phase one is eight units out of the total for a specific reason: you do not want interest running on 27 townhomes at once. Build eight, sell them off, then start the next group. The interest you are not paying on 19 unbuilt units is real money.

How to read whether an area is good

1. 01

   Comparables

   What real estate actually sells for there is the first and clearest signal.

2. 02

   Traffic

   This site sits half a mile off the second busiest road in a county of 600,000 people, close to the freeway. Traffic is a proxy for demand.

3. 03

   What is around it

   Restaurants, retail, grocery, schools. Ask whether you would want to live there if everything you need is close. Prices in that pocket run higher than the outskirts of the county for exactly that reason.

Running comps when there are no comps

There are not many duplexes in this immediate neighborhood, so the process widens in steps. Start inside the neighborhood. If nothing matches, look for townhomes further out. Townhomes that sold on 138th, twenty streets from a site on 117th, are not in the neighborhood but are still in the same market. You can run comps at close to a city level as long as you hold the result loosely and know it may not be the final price here. Those comps were selling in the $430,000s and $450,000s, which supports a $450,000 price point.

Where phase one stands

Two buildings are near done and two are about 45 days behind. The first building’s siding is complete, mixing lap and board and batten for a modern look painted black and white; the second is going full farmhouse in lighter colors. Metal roofs throughout.

Inside, drywall is textured, finish carpentry material is delivered and doors are going in, and flooring and cabinets are done with protective board over the new floors. Two to four weeks out, with paint the long pole at 4 to 5 days. On the back buildings, excavation and foundation are done and framing is finishing, with roofers already on site for the completed building and windows on site ready to install.

The numbers, again

Each unit is a 3 bed 2.5 bath at 1,500 square feet. Estimated at about $160 per square foot including permitting, architectural, and design fees plus hard costs, so $240,000 a unit before the 10% builder fee. Actual is landing closer to $142, roughly $216,000 of savings across eight units, because construction pricing followed the market down.

On market timing

Arthur’s read is straightforward: projects bought at high prices in a high-rate window were hard to sell into the following years, while projects picked up during the harder stretch sold well afterward. Land is cheaper now, and his current pickups carry better margins because of it. If rates come down later, the market moves up, and you already built at the lower cost basis, which means more equity than you underwrote for.

Watch more on Arthur's channel.

Common questions