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By Katie Conroy

Getting into commercial real estate development isn’t about one singular talent — it’s about fusing patience, foresight, and grit with a willingness to learn how cities breathe, budgets move, and deals really happen. While the final product may be a towering hotel or a bustling mixed-use block, the path there is full of quiet decisions. If you’re prepping to enter this field, you’ll want more than enthusiasm. You’ll need readiness, built on details most people overlook: when to engage an architect, how to price a parking lot, where zoning policy stutters, and why deals fall apart over bathroom specs. Here’s what to look for—and what to look out for—before diving in.

Start With the Deals, Not the Dream

Before you learn what makes a development great, you need to know what makes a deal possible. There’s a difference. Spending time with actual investment memos, feasibility reports, or even broker packets lets you exercise your deal‑analysis muscles. Don’t underestimate the value of repetition: breaking down real, flawed, or failed developments teaches you what spreadsheets alone can’t. Deals are where theory gets punched in the face by timelines, tenant requests, and poor soil reports. Try shadowing someone reviewing deals if possible — absorbing their questions is more useful than asking your own too soon. And yes, start looking at cap rates. A lot.

Call in the Experts—Especially Early

Don’t make the rookie mistake of trying to sketch buildings before understanding constraints. Partnering early with architects can prevent budget blowups, timeline slips, and regulatory tangles. Even before land is under contract, a seasoned design professional can offer clarity on setbacks, massing logic, and code traps you’d miss. The benefits of working with a professional firm extend far beyond design — they help translate your intentions into technical narratives that survive planning meetings. When you engage architectural talent early, you gain both vision and defense. And in this game, you need both.

Get Serious About Documents and Deal Hygiene

Real estate lives and dies in paperwork. LOIs, purchase agreements, environmental reports—they all stack up, and you’ll need clean systems from day one. That’s why understanding even basic digital document workflows is non-negotiable. Getting familiar with the overview of signing PDF files isn’t just about convenience — it’s about reducing friction, tracking obligations, and speeding up decision loops. As more municipalities and lenders move toward digital platforms, sloppy signature practices aren’t just annoying they’re risky. Set a system now, before the volume swells.

Become Fluent in Financial Models

You’ll hear people say “learn Excel,” but that’s not the full picture. The developers who move fastest aren’t just formula-proficient, they know how to stress-test assumptions, tell stories through returns, and challenge soft numbers. That means mastering pro‑forma and waterfall modeling early enough to make mistakes privately. The more fluent you become with modeling equity splits, IRR thresholds, and construction draws, the more you’ll spot when others are winging it. These models aren’t just boxes and numbers—they reveal risk tolerance, time expectations, and project priorities. Plus, they give you language — numbers that negotiate when words stall.

Understand Risk Like a Developer, Not a Broker

Everyone in real estate talks about risk, but developers feel it. They sit with it through storm season, permitting purgatory, and contractor chaos. Your job is to learn not how to avoid risk, but how to own it. Resiliency, for example, can no longer be a back-pocket consideration — it has to be front-loaded. You’ll need to get familiar with crafting a dynamic risk‑mitigation plan that protects projects from both regulatory whiplash and environmental stress. No one gets a pass on this anymore — especially not lenders.

You Don’t Have to Do It All—But You Should Know How

One of the hidden truths about commercial development is that the field is wide, not narrow. You’re not choosing between “developer” and “not developer” — you’re choosing where your leverage is. You might build your niche in capital sourcing, entitlement navigation, or site acquisition. But spend real time deciding among varied CRE career paths to understand what kind of developer you might eventually become. The ecosystem is full of roles — analyst, asset manager, underwriter, broker, designer, GC — and each one has different exposure to risk, upside, and visibility. The more fluently you can speak across roles, the better your deals will be.

Know That Green Isn’t Optional Anymore

Developers who ignore sustainability will be irrelevant in ten years. Maybe five. Green roofs, passive ventilation, solar exposure — they’re not just trends, they’re baseline expectations in most cities. But sustainability isn’t just about the planet — it’s about people. Great developments now anchor themselves in values by integrating socially‑responsive development strategies. That could mean community benefit agreements, equity hiring commitments, or adaptive reuse of legacy structures. When you build with empathy, it shows.

This isn’t a career where you “land a job” and coast. It’s a landscape you have to earn your way into, piece by piece. Every insight you gather, every constraint you internalize, every person you learn to ask the right question of—it all folds into your future deals. You don’t need a perfect plan to get started. But you do need to start with clear eyes and a long view. Commercial real estate development rewards those who pair practicality with vision, and who are humble enough to learn from everyone — especially the dirt, the drawings, and the deals that didn’t close. If that excites you? You’re probably already on your way.

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