Shane Mason

As requested: Underwriting 101 for non-finance folks If you know how to design or build a building, but don’t how to judge whether a project is a good financial investment or a waste of time, read on! 1.The Proforma 2.Underwriting a. Market Study b. Yield Study c. Profitability Metrics d. Sources and Uses 3.Fundraising a. Debt – Local/regional banks vs private lenders b. Equity - Self Funding vs taking on investors Section 1 – The Proforma Below is a simplified proforma for a small development project. Don’t let the numbers scare you – we will break it down section by section, using simple examples. To start, let’s pause and understand the mechanism for value creation in real estate development: Yield on Cost - Cap Rate = the Development Spread (Net Operating Income aka NOI / Cap Rate) - (NOI / Yield on Cost) = Value Created Here’s a simplified example showing the development spread in action– 1.You build a $600k project all cash, lease it up, and clear $60k per year (10% yield) 2.You find a buyer who is willing to pay $1mm for a leased building that clears $60k per year (6% cap) 3.Congratulations, you created $400k of value. (60k NOI / 6% cap rate) - (60k NOI / 10% Yield on Cost) = 1,000,000 - 600,000 = $400,000 For those who haven’t seen these terms before, they are defined below: Stabilized Net Operating Income is the annual net income received from your rentals after deducting vacancy costs and operating expenses. Stabilized Net Operating Income = Rent at full occupancy (aka Gross Potential) – Stabilized Vacancy - Expenses Yield on Cost measures the investment yield of the asset to the developer, or how much annual profit the stabilized project will generate relative to its Total Cost. Yield on Cost = Stabilized Net Operating Income / Total Project Cost Cap Rate measures the investment yield of the asset for the end buyer, or how much annual profit the buyer is receiving relative to their Purchase Price. Cap Rate = Net Operating Income / Purchase Price Was this worth the headache? That ultimately depends on what you and your investors are looking for. But here are a few metrics we use to determine that: Section 2 - Underwriting Underwriting is the process of running the numbers to gauge the profitability of a potential investment and see if it's worth the brain damage and the risk Your goal in underwriting is to identify all of the assumptions necessary to make a profitable project that is worth the brain damage and risk it takes to do it. The first step in underwriting a development project is to calculate the yield on cost and compare it to the cap rate. Calculating Yield on Cost The first step for calculating the yield is defining your rent and occupancy assumptions by commissioning a market study. This report should define the boundaries of your market and assess the rents and occupancy within it. If the market study shows there’s a ton of vacancy, then you may want to skip that project. Once you’ve confirmed the rents and determined you have a reasonable chance at leasing up, the next step is to define how much square footage you can build by commissioning a massing study. This study should determine how much rentable square footage (rsf) you can squeeze out of the site. Generally speaking for infill markets - the more density you can build, the more your property will be worth. Next, get out in the market and talk to people. The fun part about real estate is that it’s a people business – you have to talk to people to learn the market. Here are some things you’ll need to find out to complete your underwriting: 1.Vacancy and expense assumptions for your asset type in your market. 2.Total cost to build (including fees). 3.Cap rates for similar projects With this info in hand, you can finish your underwriting. Multiply rent by total rsf to get gross potential rent, then subtract vacancy and op ex to calculate NOI (Net Operating Income). Divide NOI by Cap Rate to get your projected sales price, and compare to your all in cost. This is your total projected profit. Is it worth your time? That depends – to learn how to answer this question, please read on below. Determining if a project is worth pursuing To determine if a project pencils, you need to consider the following things 1.Who will the investors be (if any) and how long are they comfortable holding the asset for? 2.How long is the holding period? 3.What are the returns? 4.What is the risk? Defining your Hold Period Your business plan can vary dramatically depending on you and your investors goals. Here are the two primary plans: 1.Long term hold – Hold the property for cashflow, enjoy the tax benefits, and ride out long term rent growth. This is best for HNW folks who don’t need their equity back anytime soon. This maximizes total proceeds. 2.Merchant build – Sell the property as soon as it’s leased up (or sooner). You will be selling for a lower price / ft than if you hold it a long time, but you will get your money sooner. Calculating the returns Once you know your goals, here are 3 metrics you can use to gauge the profitability of your project. 1. Cash on Cash: Net Cashflow / Total Investment. This is your actual cash yield from the asset. You can compare this to owning a bond – it’s the actual % return you are earning on your money while it’s tied up in the asset. Depending on your situation, you may be able to include tax benefits in the numerator, further driving cash on cash for your investment. 2. IRR: total cashflows annualized over the hold period. The shorter your hold, the higher your IRR. Shortening hold period drives IRR more than increasing sales proceeds does. Most Real Estate Private Equity Firms derive their compensation from how well they perform on this metric. Most investors want to see 16%+ IRR for development projects, but some huge developers find investors willing to accept as low as 12% for trophy assets. 3. Equity Multiple: Total Distributions (net cashflow + proceeds from sale) / Total Investment. Generally speaking, the longer you hold the larger your multiple will be. Fully leased and seasoned properties generally command a higher price per square foot than newly delivered product because they have less lease up risk. Rents also tend to go up over the hold period, and each $1 of net rent can add $10 or more in sales value. (Remember, NOI / Cap Rate = Sales Price) Most investors want a 1.4 minimum multiple, or else it’s just not worth the brain damage and the risk. You can compare this figure to 10 year treasuries. Most investors want to earn a spread over the treasury (T+ 1% at least) to make development worth the risk. For long term holds, you are focused on maximizing cash on cash return and total multiple. For merchant builds, you are focused on IRR subject to a minimum multiple. Risk analysis Here are some questions I like to ask in order to determine if the returns are worth the risk 1.How much is my total investment? 2.How conservative are my underwriting assumptions? 3.How long will the project take to reach profitability? 4.In a worst case scenario, how bad can the deal get? Be careful when you are underwriting high IRR projects with big budgets and short holds. The total multiple might be low, meaning there’s a risk of asset value being lower than your total cost to build should the market turn on you. Section 3 – Fundraising Once you’ve underwritten a project that appears to meet your team’s goals, the next step is putting together the Sources and Uses. This table summarizes the total project budget as well as the total sources of capital for funding the budget. Sources, AKA total budget: You can put a bracket on these figures by asking for data points from architects, loan brokers, and GCs. Uses, AKA capital stack used to fund the total budget: Generally, development projects are funded using a combination of both debt and equity. A loan broker can provide data points on how much you will be able to borrow to fund your deal. Sources of Debt 1. Local bank / Credit Union – lowest rates but will require you to personally guarantee repayment of the loan (aka recourse). This is typically the best execution available for loans of under $5 million, but they aren’t always open to funding construction costs. 2. Private lenders – high rates and high fees. This is sometimes the only group willing to make small construction loans. Sources of Equity - the example attached proforma assumes you are self-funding. Many sponsors raise Other Peoples Money (OPM) through syndications or joint ventures (JV), which greatly reduces the sponsor’s total capital investment. Structures using OPM could be the topic of their own post, but I will provide a simple comparison of OPM vs self funding below 1. OPM: spread the risk, spread the reward. This requires complicated legal documents and a higher admin/accounting workload than if you fund the deal yourself. 2. Self-Funding: all your money, all your risk, all your reward. Simplest execution, least amount of legal and admin headache. If you liked what you read I’d appreciate if you gave me a follow, retweet, or signed up for my newsletter Follow me @DeveloperDude_ for frequent content on development, deal structures, and running an SMB Sign up for my newsletter for longer pieces like this: masonequitypartners.com/news… Hope that helped you better understand how to analyze real estate investments. Thank you for reading to the end! @MasterStudent9 @beingjameson @AmandaBuildsUp @SMBfella @k_thos @scarrolsean @sjwpeaceful

I've hired several Executive Assistants over the years, and Dot is the best Assistant I've ever had. Here's a comparison of 3 of the biggest assistant agents:

Modern real estate operators are all trying automate underwriting with AI to save time. Be warned! If you approach automation in the wrong way it will take you longer than if you built the whole model by hand. (Ask me how I know lol) Save some time, learn from my mistakes. Here are my top 3 Do's and Don'ts for modeling with AI: DON'T - Ask Naive one-shot prompts : "hey claude here's a data room, build me a financial model" For complex multi-sheet waterfall models with circular referenfces, this doesn't really work. AI will do what AI does best and give you something that looks presentable, but when you dig into the formulas you'll find that it's all slop. - Ask for a cascading multi-sheet change: "hey claude, help me rewire the interest reserve module" AI will happily do whatever you ask, and will even tell you that it's checked it's work and everything's correct. Then you'll end up with a ref'd out model because you had AI implement an ill-defined global change. - Knock off another model: "hey claude here's this vetted institutional model, make our model as good as this one" AI will create something that looks institutional, and it may even resemble the model you provided, but the devil's in the details and the formulas are gonna look weird with lots of hardcoding and strange calculations that a human would never do. DO - Give the AI a reference mockup While an agent will get lost emulating an entire model, you can get good results if you provide a tightly scoped mockup of the function or module that you want. This exercise helps clarify what your request is and when simplified enough will guide the AI toward generating a helpful result. - Limit the scope of your prompts and verify their results Give the AI clear, specific, bounded instructions combined with evaluation criteria that let the agent know whether the task succeeded. Eyeball the results yourself to see that everything looks right before proceeding to the next change. - Build context so your model can improve over time Modern acquisition shops build out Claude Skills for modeling, where they can ingest a data room and have the information accurately percolate throughout their model. This is only possible by providing the AI with crystal clear instructions on how to update a model, as well as a pre-processing workflow to get the input data into the format your AI is used to. *DISCLAIMER* I rebuilt my firm's financial model using Opus 4.6 - 4.8 and Fable 5. I have not performed heavy model rebuilds since. If you have successfullyx one shot a complex model with Opus 5.5, Fable 5.1, or Astra, let me know in the comments!

Each day begins with an exec brief from my AI personal assistant. It's one of the highest leverage activites you can do with AI. Here's how I do it: I dictate everything I have going on to my assistant (I use chat gpt Dot). The agent can see my Asana task list and ongoing projects in Obsidian and based on my transcript is able to help distill my priorities. Once we have a to do list, my agent suggests time blocks using my connected calendar. We keep a record of past time blocks and time tracking data from my calendar and the clockify API. This creates a feedback loop for planning the work more realistically, with room for breaks and gaps. I don't always time block, and I almost never get to the end of the daily to do list, but an exec brief informed by actual historical logged work is a powerful tool for keeping me moving toward my goals. Anyone else here start their day with a brief, Ai generated or otherwise? Share what works for you in the comments!

We built a numerical palace around our storage underwriting. Killer analysis is not always the best thing. The details that made our team comfortable with the deal took a lot of time to compute, and they weren’t necessarily the details other people cared about. Some people will do their own underwriting. Others will trust that you’ve done yours. In retrospect, thinking harder about scope and removing as much as possible could have given us a simple enough deliverable to ship faster and get market feedback sooner. That would probably have been a better path than the one we took. Feature creep is real and time to market matters! Can you share a time when you wish you would have cut scope to get to market sooner? Share your story in the comments!