How to Find Your Property Development Team

You will often hear me say that my secret to success in property development has been my team. By team I mean the professionals we bring around us to add expertise to each step of the property development process.

As property developers, we leverage their time and expertise. And the beautiful thing is that they have all studied for years and gained years of experience in the marketplace, irrespective of your personal educational status.

In fact, the industrialist and one-time wealthiest man in the world Andrew Carnegie has as an epitaph on his grave “Here lies a man who knew how to enlist in his service better men than himself”. That is the key to success in just about any business endeavour.

So, who is on this property development team we need to enlist and how do we find them?

Let’s start with the most basic form of property development – a splitter or technically a one into two lot subdivision. Once we have found a suitable site we need to roll out our professional team members to gain the approvals.

While you could use both a surveyor and town planner for the development approval because of its simplicity a consulting surveyor would suffice. For the next approval (engineering approval) a civil engineer would suffice.

Once we step up to say a small townhouse development we need to engage a few more professionals. For a simple development application, we would require an architect (or building designer), surveyor, town planner and landscape architect.

For the building permit, we would need to include engineers, certifier, energy expert etc. alongside the architect.

Knowing who we need is one thing, but how do we find them? Sometimes finding one can lead to many. For instance, architects often have their favourite team consisting of a town planner, surveyor, engineers etc. The same with town planners. Engage one and inherit their team.

Some councils, in the town planning section of their website, have publicly accessible information about property development applications including who the professional consultants are. In other words, other property developer’s teams.

On the safety fences of many property developments, you will see signage erected by team members such as the builder, architect, engineers and even the financier.

You can even Google team members. For instance, “architects Parramatta”. From there you can visit their website, view their photo gallery etc. Once you have selected three or four you could call them and ask such questions as – the size of the practice, how long they have been in the area, typical project sizes they do.

You could then narrow it down and visit two architects and see their work, ask for the addresses of projects to drive by, obtain referrals from builders, town planners, engineers, and past and current clients.

Whichever way you do it – once you have formed an effective property development team you can recycle them project after project.

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