Three people want into a land assemblage with no cash flow for four years, and the reporting is the hard part.

Here is a scenario worth working through. Say an operator is tying up four contiguous parcels at the edge of a growing small city, 31 acres total across the four, currently zoned agricultural with the comprehensive plan showing residential in that direction. Two are under contract, one owner is talking, and the fourth is an estate and slow. All in, the operator needs about 310k to close what is under contract plus carry the taxes and a survey and the entitlement work. The operator has 90k. Three people have said yes to the rest, 220k between them, all of them long standing relationships. The part worth chewing on is the reporting. Every structure written up for this assumes there is a quarterly distribution and an occupancy number. This has neither. It produces nothing for maybe four years and the only news between now and then is a planning commission meeting that gets continued twice. So what does an investor update look like when nothing happened? A quarterly that says taxes paid, still waiting, three times in a row trains investors to stop reading. Writing only when there is news means the first year they hear nothing and start wondering. The money also has to cover carry. Property taxes on the four run about 6,100 a year now and will jump if the rezone lands. That comes out of the 310k, which means investor capital is being spent on nothing visible. The specific question: set a fixed update schedule that might have nothing to fill, or promise updates on milestones and define the milestones up front? The second looks stronger, with the discomfort that the operator gets to decide what counts as a milestone. How do people here handle it?