Build to sell? Five ways to do it right.

In a sale development, “luxury” is not a brand line. It is a price quartile, a buyer mix, and an absorption curve. Get the positioning wrong and every downstream number — GDV, peak funding, DSCR-equivalent cash coverage, equity cheques — is fiction.

Five ways to underwrite a sale scheme properly

• Treat positioning as a price quartile, not a brochure. ASP has to sit in a market band the city can actually absorb.
• Model payment plans and buyer mix. Cash buyers, mortgage buyers, and progress payments do not produce the same monthly cash.
• Align sales uptake with construction. Front-loaded, even, or back-loaded absorption changes peak funding more than a 2% cost tweak.
• Put escrow and gap-fill on the page. 10/90, staged escrow, or progress drawdown is a financing constraint, not a legal footnote.
• Stress discounts, commissions, VAT, and defaults before you lock land. Net sales proceeds — not headline GDV — pay the scheme.

What the Sale Stream actually models

Residential towers, landed product, commercial strata, and mixed-use. Development costs, sales revenue, unlevered project IRR, financing with escrow logic, levered equity returns, then scenarios. Typically a development horizon with no terminal value — returns come from costs versus net proceeds, not an exit cap rate borrowed from a hold model.

Positioning isn’t a marketing word in a feasibility study — it’s a price quartile. And it changes every number downstream.