How should a manager write a lease-up agreement when the owner's absorption assumption looks too optimistic

Take a management company that runs stabilized buildings and gets asked to take on a lease-up. Say 180 units across three buildings with phased certificates of occupancy over about five months, on a nine month delivery. The hesitation is reasonable. Lease-up is a different business from stabilized management. The fee structure is different, usually a fixed monthly during construction plus a per-unit lease-up bonus, and the staffing curve is brutal, a leasing team gets hired and then shed. Stabilized operating margins run around 9 percent and lease-up does not behave the same way. The part that actually matters is the absorption assumption. An owner's pro forma showing 22 units a month in a submarket that has absorbed a lot of new delivery in the last 18 months should be treated skeptically, since real absorption in that situation often lands closer to 12 to 14 with concessions. If a manager signs to the owner's number and delivers a lower one, the manager becomes the reason the interest reserve ran out. The two questions worth asking anyone who has been on either side of this: how to write the management agreement so the absorption assumption belongs to the owner and not the manager, and whether there is a fee structure for lease-up that does not punish the manager for reporting the truth in month two.