Do you need a construction background to develop, or can you hire it

Question

I'm on my third value-add project and every developer I talk to came out of one of two places. Either they built things for a living and moved up into owning them, or they came from finance and hired a construction manager. Both seem to work and both people tell me the other route is harder.

The case for coming from the field: you know when a subcontractor's number is fake, you know what a two week weather delay actually does to the schedule, and you can walk a slab and see the problem before it gets buried. The case for hiring it: your job as a developer is land, entitlements, and capital, and paying an owner's rep 1 to 2 percent of hard costs buys you that expertise without a decade of scars. Plenty of people who know construction cold have still lost money because they misread a rent comp.

I've got the renovation side down but ground-up scares me, mostly the part where I have no gut feel for a schedule. Curious how the room splits.

joe_delgado5 · Answer

I'd say hire it, but hire it before you buy the dirt, not after. My margins are thin enough that I learned this the annoying way on a small gut job. The people who can save you are the ones who look at the site while you can still walk away. An owner's rep reading your GC contract after you've already closed on land and signed a purchase price is doing damage control.

Also quarry, no gut feel for a schedule is fixable in one project if you sit through every weekly OAC meeting and write down what slipped and why. It's the not knowing you don't know that kills people.

Do you need a construction background to develop, or can you hire it

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