Learning curve in development
how would you describe the learning curve in development?
What are things that made you successful in the space?
I've been in development for a year and a half now. Enjoy working with my boss, however, i can feel like his time is way too limited and it's impacting my ability to learn more or at least be mentored in a way where i can make decisions more confidently. Do you think your boss's ability to mentor you has made a difference in how successful you've been in the development world? I don't know if i'm setting too high of expectations there.
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Yes, the mentoring you get is wildly important. That being said, he hired you to do a job, not suck up a lot of his time, so it's not unreasonable after 18 months to expect you to go and try and walk on your own without him there at all times.
Frankly, he's probably trying to get you to go make decisions and make some mistakes along the way. That's the only way to really learn. Get into the docs, the plans, the underwriting and figure out on your own how all the pieces fit together - I can guarantee you your boss isn't going to let you make a decision that will sink the firm, and if he gets angry at you for making a mistake, that's on him and not you (unless it's one you've already made, yada yada yada). My best piece of advice is to go walk the construction site often. Nothing will bring it all together like watching a building come out of the ground. And the construction process is by far the most opaque part of development, and the piece that folks in the office will have the least handle on. It's a major value add to understand.
Need more input.
How big are the projects you're working on? Are you doing projects for your own account or with investor money? How involved is the dev team with all the professional firms/subs involved? Are you sourcing opportunities yourself or paying bird dogs for leads? Does firm hold projects or dump them to recycle capital? What is your role in the process currently? You mention making decisions confidently... what kind of decisions?
There's a spectrum of possibilities here - on one end are the small bootstrap developers who do it all themselves and have fingerprints on every aspect of the project from idea to sale. The other end are the people with money and vision that engage professionals to manage the actual process for them so all they have to do is make decisions and try to collect fees from financing so they can move on to the next one. Where on the spectrum do you fall?
All of the projects are quite small mostly 4-5 units valued at around $4 million as the average. Two other projects I manage are upwards towards $6-8 million and have higher unit counts. These are all basically townhomes that are designed as either for rent or for-sale. 9 different projects in construction plus 7 others in pre-construction.
All of these are investor money.
The GC is in-house and manages most of the pre-con approval process. Because there's so many projects we have, we have pretty good relationships with specific vendors and consultants that we use.
I'm not sourcing opportunities, another guy on my team does that. My primary role is development manager, I have to catch hold of all acquisitions that come in and make sure they make it through the pre-con approval process, get into construction and finally reach delivery for stabilization/disposition.
We dump most of them to recycle capital and put it into new projects.
Most of my decision making is related to the construction process and management of budget/funds and schedule for the project. I mostly am not sure in my decisions sometime is because I haven't finished the complete life cycle of one asset yet, or I will be soon in this quarter, after several long awaited delays.
The company has been doing a little bit of a reset. They were competing in a different space of development that proved to be not-so-profitable and before I came it sounded like there were a lot of employees that were idle. Since then, they've made the team particularly lean and focused on engaging external consultants to cover specialized areas. Overall, though i think we're trying to grow slightly more of an influence in each project as opposed to simply being just an orchestrator.
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Learn moreMentorship is important (irreplaceable) but I also realized a few years in that once you've got good footing mentorship should be more a person to bounce the occasional questions off of/to leech knowledge off of by watching them work. After they've taught you enough to be mostly self sufficient, the best learning happens by just figuring it out on your own and making mistakes.
To address your initial question, the learning curve is steep - you essentially need to become a "B" player in all phases to effectively run a project independently from underwriting to stabilization including underwriting/financial analysis, due diligence, closing, entitlement, construction, financing and marketing/lease up. There will be resources along the way depending upon your firm (via other internal employees or third parties) but you'll still need to understand the important parts/areas of focus of each phase and more importantly tie them all together to run a project smoothly.
As others have mentioned, mentorship is critical because you can learn through them the skills I described above. Ideally you are given phases of the process to run so that way you can learn without having all the responsibility all at once.
To address your specific concern, one of the core skillsets to success in development is the ability to find resources independently and those who thrive with a high sense of autonomy. You absolutely have to be "politely persistent" (oftentimes without being polite). Development as an activity is the art of juggling a bunch of balls so the daily schedule of a senior leader can be quite busy - I would encourage you to make your growth a priority and push your mentor to lead (or at the very least pass along knowledge for your benefit). Immerse yourself in what's available to you, think it through on your own and generate a list of questions to review with them. Some good activities would be reading through/analyzing all key documents (loan docs, partnership agreements, PSAs, construction contracts), construction drawing packages, land use attorney letters or zoning analysis and your company's full financial models to name a few.
Set a standing meeting with them and hold them to it where you can ask questions about the above. Push hard for more autonomy in your role and make yourself essential by going ahead and doing tasks that you think are important but no one is addressing.
I'm in a similar spot where my boss doesn't come in often (2-3 days a week if that), will show up late (they're still pretty junior basically a senior analyst) and it's generally me focusing on acquisitions waiting for next steps. Any advice there? Seems not to be ideal, but I've also been hearing no one can make deals work right now with where rates are and a majority of people are on the sidelines so I am looking at plans, OMs, models to get thoughts and put things together but it's generally slow overall and I shouldn't complain.
Let me know what you think, on one hand I think someone should be in more as an active mentor, on the other things are slow and places are laying others off/not a lot of acquisition roles out there.
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