http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress Actual real estate investing and development projects, including methods, lessons learned and profits! Wed, 14 May 2008 14:26:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As discussed in a previous post, the development we were building in has its own dedicated sales team. It made sense to have them represent us for a number of reasons: They ran both a national and regional advertising campaign They typically showed all available properties to potential customers no matter how ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/14/marketing-plan-first-development/ Never enter into a contract with a contractor without a defined schedule as part of the contract itself. Just agreeing on an end date isn't good enough. Why? Because no matter how far behind schedule your project is, the contractor will always insist he can still make the end date. ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/11/managing-the-construction-schedule/ You want your contractor to provide you the highest quality project, in the shortest time frame for the most inexpensive price. What we call the three-legged stool. Unfortunately, some of these desires are in direct conflict with one another. For example, it is tough to get the highest quality project ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/07/managing-your-construction-contractor/ With the decision to move forward with this real estate development, we quickly pushed the start of construction. The site was cleared, the septic system installed, foundations placed and framing started. Here's some photos of the actual construction: Foundation Wall from the Lake Aerial Photo of Foundation Walls   Framing Underway Other than a number of ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/05/03/construction-started-first-development/ Revised Financial Model Our last post walked through our revised financial model. In running the numbers, we had a dilemma. The highest priced spec luxury home sold to date on this lake went for $1,700,000. In our latest financial model, we would have over $1.9 million in costs! The model we ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/30/the-decision-first-development/ We must be finally making a name for ourselves. In the last week, we have had close to 1,000 separate pieces of trackback spam! What a pain, but it must mean that we are worth the effort to spam. In addition, our posts are starting to be selected as the top ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/26/this-blog-is-finally-getting-noticed/ Actual Second Financial Model Our previous post discussed  that we would need to develop a second model that more accurately described this real estate investment after we had received a revised design and more accurate contractor pricing. Our initial model was flat out wrong. Our bankers were willing to finance the ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/25/second-real-estate-financial-model/ Our contractor did a good job pricing this new preliminary design discussed in our last post. He provided us with a 31 page estimate with the detail we needed to fully analyze this pricing. We couldn't afford to get this wrong and have to go back to the bank a ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/23/the-contractors-estimate-first-development/ In a previous post, we discussed how all of the conceptual floor plans were around 4,500 SF, which greatly exceeded our initial financial model which was based upon 3,200 SF of heated space. We had made some changes to various room sizes and layouts and had sent the architect back ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/19/revised-design-first-development/ Meeting with the Bank From our previous post on this development you will recall that we just found out we couldn't build the building we wanted and keep it close to our 3,200 SF we had in our initial financial model. We decided that the first step in figuring out whether ... http://myactualprofits.com/wordpress/2008/04/16/getting-this-real-estate-investment-on-track/