Stopping short of vertical development could be the best bet.
It’s no secret that ground-up real estate development can be as risky as residential and commercial real estate investment can get. It can also be the highest-rewarding type of investment. A primary reason for both the risk and potential reward is the passage of time and how the market evolves, or fails to evolve, over the course of the pre-delivery period.
For projects of scale, the timeline before market delivery often spans several years, especially in highly-regulated jurisdictions where entitlement (inclusive of, at least, conceptual design) itself can can last more than 1 year.
Given the unpredictability of markets, is the best mix of certain risk and potential reward for those who “must” develop to simply entitle land and then sell it to a vertical developer?
