Keep track of your development finance
In a commercial development there is always an element of risk involved. It's not just your money that's at stake, but your reputation, too
A residential development has hazards enough, but a commercial development can be even more risky due to the amounts of money and people involved. If you don't plan it properly and keep track of your development finances, the whole project could fail and you will have lost your money and perhaps worse, your reputation.
Commercial developments include:
Project plan
Once you've secured funding from your development finance specialist you'll
need to write a comprehensive project plan to make sure that you make best use
of your finance. The project plan should provide detailed information on the
whole of the project lifecycle. It is easy for such large amounts of information
to become overly complex, confusing everyone who reads it. It needs to remain
concise yet instructive. Using the following steps as a guide will help keep
everything organised:
Write a clear plan outlining each phase of the project:
It's helpful to make use of the various skills of the people involved on the project, such as your designer, architect and marketer. That way you know you haven't missed anything out. If you're new to project planning, you can sometimes get assistance from you development finance agency.
Timetable
Using some project management software, such as Microsoft Project can be very
useful in helping you keep track of both your development finances and your
budget. This lets you estimate a timetable against each task on your project
plan and allows you to see which can happen simultaneously and which need to
be done consecutively. Always have a realistic timescale. Thinking that you
can get work done sooner than it can be, will put you, and everyone involved
in the project, under pressure and it is likely to have a knock-on effect on
the standard of build and finish.
Project management
Throughout the project it is important to have someone in charge of overseeing
the many contractors that are involved and the work they are doing. This means
there is a single person for people to report to and therefore the chances of
mistakes being made are minimised. You should be prepared for things to change
along the way due to unforeseen circumstances, but by making a clear project
plan and sticking to it as much as possible, you can lower the possibility of
things going awry and it could be the difference between success and failure.
Abbots Finance is an independent arranger of development finance. Call us now on 0870 2401957 to see what we can do for you.