Companion files
Land, Consent, Cost, Programme and the Delivery of a Scheme
Five Excel workbooks. The first is the residual appraisal and the four tests that turn it into a decision document. The second is the worked scheme of Chapter 16, from first site visit to disposal, built to show where the return was actually decided. The third and fourth are the working documents: land diligence in five stages, the cost plan interrogation, the risk register, change control and handover. The fifth writes down the comparison Chapter 14 asks for and does not perform. 44 figures are checked against the book, and all 44 reproduce.
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Chapter 3
A scheme with a value of 100 and costs of 80 supports a land price of 20. Move each by five per cent and the land value becomes 11 — two five per cent movements, a forty-five per cent fall. That is why development is a high-beta activity and why competitive land bidding tends to be won by whoever is most optimistic. The four tests of the chapter run live: an 8 per cent cost movement takes the land value from 6.4 to 1.4, a nine-month delay takes it to 2.9, a five per cent value fall takes it to 1.4, and all three together make it negative. Two further sheets do the work that matters in practice. One asks what the assumptions would have to be for the price on the table to work, and produces the cost overrun and the value decline that would each eliminate the profit — the two numbers the book says belong on the front page. The other is a quarterly cash flow: peak funding requirement, how long it is held, and what a delay costs. On the illustrative scheme the cash flow’s interest exceeds the summary appraisal’s finance line by more than a fifth of the profit, and nothing on the summary would have shown it.
Chapter 16
At month five the appraisal gives a residual of 3.6 against a conditional contract price of 7.6. The scheme does not work. The team interrogates the inputs rather than abandoning it, the residual moves to 5.9, and a difficult conversation backed by a ground investigation and a daylight assessment moves the price to 6.4. Everything after that was execution — and the workbook proves it: had the developer completed at 7.6, the realised profit would have been 2.4 on a cost of 27.7, about 8.7 per cent for four years of risk. The timeline records every movement in the cost, and the contingency arithmetic beneath it is the whole argument for change control: two draws against 0.8 held leaves 0.30, and had the enlarged entrance at month 24 been approved at 0.28 there would have been 0.02 left when inflation arrived at month 33. The programme risk that mattered was not construction. One month was lost on site; three were lost to the discharge of conditions nobody had programmed.
Appendices A and B
The 28-point land appraisal checklist in its five stages, with a column for the cost incurred so that the sequence stays honest: desktop work measured in days, then the single obvious problem every site has, then intrusive and specialist work only once stage one clears. Doing them in that order is what makes cheap diligence the highest-return spend on a scheme. Then the six questions to ask of every cost plan, every time — what design information it is based on, what is excluded, what allowances are included, what inflation and to what date, what contingency and whose, and what the abnormals are based on. Plus the four numbers to report monthly and the three rules of contingency discipline.
Appendices C, D, E and F
The risk register with its five fields, including the trigger — the observable event that says this is materialising, which is the field nobody fills in and the one that turns a register from a document into a management tool. The eleven risks that recur, to be reviewed monthly at the same meeting as the cost report and the programme, because they are the same subject seen three ways. The six-step change control protocol with the category table and the claims discipline. The completion and handover checklist, built on the principle that the handover package is not something you receive but something you check. And ten interview questions with what a good answer contains, useful from either side of the table.
Appendix H · Chapter 14
Chapter 14 says the judgement is a probability-weighted comparison and then, in three words: “Write that comparison down.” It never does. This writes it down, on the chapter’s own scheme — four floors, an occupier wanting two of them at eight per cent below market on a fifteen-year term, conditional on a dedicated entrance.
The rent concession costs 1.91 times its own NPV. A developer prices it as 16,000 a year for fifteen years — 145,727 discounted. A buyer capitalises it in perpetuity, so at exit it is 278,261. The rule worth carrying out of this file: divide rent foregone by your exit yield, not by your discount rate.
Against that, the void the pre-let removes costs 682,000 — two and a half times the concession, at about 57,000 a month. And the largest line in it is not the interest everyone watches; it is the rent-free incentive a completed empty building needs, which speculative appraisals routinely omit because it feels like rent arriving later rather than a cost.
Then the comparison itself, and a result the chapter does not anticipate: the pre-let beats even the best speculative outcome, by 446,994. It dominates, so no probability makes speculating right — which is a far easier case to take to an investment committee than a weighted average nobody can defend. The question becomes how much you could concede: about 21 per cent before the best case catches up, 31 before the expected one. The occupier asked for eight.
And the concession nobody priced. The dedicated entrance takes three per cent of the building and is worth the same as a six per cent rent discount — permanently, where the rent discount runs fifteen years. The occupier asked for eight on rent and six in configuration, and the negotiation was about the eight, because the eight had a number attached. Fifteen checks.
| Blue text | a hardcoded input — you may edit these |
| Black text | a formula — do not overtype these |
| Green text | a link to another sheet |
| Yellow fill | the assumptions that carry the answer |
29 figures are checked against the book across the first two workbooks, and all 29 reproduce. Each line carries its own tolerance, set to the precision the book actually prints.
Two readings had to be taken out of the arithmetic rather than from the text, and both are stated on the sheet where they matter. Chapter 3 holds the required profit at its appraised money amount across the four tests rather than recomputing it on the higher costs — the only reading that reproduces 1.4, 2.9 and negative 2.1. Chapter 16 states a revised residual of 5.9 without itemising the revised cost; solving backwards gives a cost excluding land of 20.4. In each case the input that carries the reading is blue, and the note beside it says what the other reading would produce.
The workbooks open in Microsoft Excel, LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets and Numbers. They use no macros and no add-ins, so nothing needs to be enabled or trusted. If your spreadsheet asks to update links on opening, decline — there are none.
The Real Estate Development Manager by Julian R. Sterling. The workbooks reproduce the worked examples in the chapters; the book is where the reasoning behind them is set out. It is not yet on sale — these files are published ahead of it.
The other books with companion files. The full list of titles is on the author page.