In planning your property development project, the bottom line must show a suitable return for the money and effort you put into it as a developer.
The ideal profit margin is between 16 and 20% on development costs.
This refers to your profit as a percentage of your total cost. We call that margin on costs or return on costs.
By way of example, let’s say you develop a three-townhouse project and each townhouse is worth $720,000 on completion.
We call that a $2,160,000 project ($720,000 x 3).
Let’s say the total cost of the project is $1,800,000.
The profit would therefore be $360,000 ($2,160,000 – 1,800,000).
The margin on cost would therefore be 20% (360,000 / 1,800,000 x 100).
Why you should aim for at least 16% net return
You can gain a higher profit margin if the property market rises during the development period.
Conversely, if the market retracts you can stand to realise a lower profit margin.
To be as safe as possible, you have a good safety buffer.
A 16–20% margin is considered the sweet spot, providing a safety net in case of abrupt changes in the market and still making a decent profit.
By working on a 16-20% margin, you can make enough money if the market is bad, and good money if the market is good.
It’s also worth considering the financing implications. On large subdivisions and apartment blocks banks often lift their financing requirements to 20–25% margin.
Banks are also using the 16% rule
A 16% margin is a conservative figure and is often the minimum return a bank would expect when offering a developer a commercial finance package.
That said, your success with the bank rises when you approach 20%.
On small projects – say up to three townhouses – you could use normal retail finance rather than commercial finance which is more expensive.
With retail finance, providing you can show suitable serviceability, the margin is often overlooked as the bank basically lends you a percentage of costs or a percentage of end value.
While this means you can do lower margin deals, for your own sake you should avoid any projects, however small, showing less than 10–12% margin.
When lending against costs, retail banks often don’t include all costs.
They’re more likely to lend against what they call ‘hard costs’ which is the land at valuation plus the construction contract sum.
Soft costs like council fees, consultant costs, marketing etc. are left to the borrower to fund 100%.
When lending against end value they tend to base that value before separate titles are issued – called ‘in one line’.
With our theoretical three townhouse project, the end value would be based on when the townhouses are completed but still on one title, before the subdivision into three titles.
The discount for ‘in one line’ value might be in the range of 10-20% lower than for separate titles.
Always work on your feasibility plan first
To minimise risks, it is crucial that you conduct a feasibility study on a potential development site.
Financial feasibility is so important, we cover it in depth in our courses and mentoring.
Sadly, I have seen newcomers to property development make costly and avoidable mistakes because they have never invested in learning how to do an accurate feasibility.
By not knowing the costs or undervaluing them you can make a bad deal look good.
Sooner or later that mistake will catch up with you. It might be down the track when you have a development approval and need to get the site valued to get finance to complete the project.
It’s too late at that point to find out you originally paid too much for the site because you neglected to conduct an accurate financial feasibility.
You now have a simple understanding of the numbers that point toward a viable property development deal. We hope this helps you on your journey. We urge you to be diligent and careful in assessing deals before going ahead with a project. Learning a proven system is a great way to build your confidence and mitigate risk.
