85 – Lessons from a 14 townhouse development
This month I wrapped up a 14 townhouse project that I have been working on for nearly five years. It has been a long, challenging and eventful project. There have been many many lessons and I will share some with you. We have finished with all the settlements in the complex. I have one remaining unit left unsold which is currently on the market and I'm looking to get that sold in the next month or so. I had always planned on keeping this unit till the end of the project because it is bigger and unattached to the rest of the dwellings on the site, and will appeal to a different range of buyers than the other ones. Anyway, I will talk more about the lessons from this project in a moment. You can check out the video below of the finished product. On my other project, I am expecting the Building Permit to be issued any day now and then have the builder on site within the next few weeks. Can't wait to get that project underway. Hopefully we have minimal delays on getting that delivered. Property Development Training If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of property development, in your own time and at your own pace, then be sure to head over to www.propertydevelopertraining.com and take a look. I take you step by step through the development process so you know exactly what is needed to find a site, run a feasibility and complete a small scale property development, be that a duplex or 3 or 4 unit site. So head over to propertydevelopertraining.com and take a look... I would love to see you on the inside... Property Developer Quiz Keen to find out how ready you might be to become a developer? Then take the Property Developer Quiz (www.propertydevelopertraining.com/quiz) and get a sense of where you are at… Lessons Learned from my 14 townhouse property development project So, on this podcast I thought I would share some of the key lessons I took out of my just finished project. For those who have been listening to the podcast for a while would know that I have been battling away on this project for a number of years, probably close to five years, which included a failed trip to the planning tribunal to try and get a planning refusal overturned. So it has been a long road. Anyway, the project is basically done now and looks fantastic. Check some of the video posts I have made on the show's Insta and Facebook pages to see how it looks. I am very proud of the finished product and the buyers who have moved in are also delighted with their new homes. So what are the lessons I have learnt from this project? Let's go through some of them. These are in no particular order just reflections I have looking back over the past few years... 1. The illusion of perfection can drive frustration One of the challenges I continue to face is the expectation that things will go smoothly, even though I know and understand there will be challenges along the way. This can be a source of frustration when things go awry or problems pop up that annoy you. For example, I had to spend $6,000 getting a new electricity connection for one of the townhouses because the council wouldn’t allow the cables from the central meter to run across the front garden of one of the townhouses at the front of the site. This was frustrating and annoying, and shouldn’t have really happened if the services engineer had designed something that council would be happy with, but they didn’t and I had to sort it out. It was frustrating and shouldn’t have happened but it did. So the lesson for me was a reminder that bumps and unexpected turns are par for the course when doing a development and you just have to roll with them. 2. Growth happens when you are challenged So following on from the previous point about perfection, is also the benefit of challenges in terms of how they help you grow and adapt. The funny thing about challenges is that they force you to evolve and learn. Easy projects don’t really teach you much,