Lenders, TRData is tracking the time it takes developers to finish projects

The New York City real estate industry is not known for punctuality. The task of constructing a building and filling it with people is an intricate undertaking and often doesn’t go according to plan. When loan repayment begins to loom, a strapped developer may choose the contractor who quotes the shortest construction time to complete their project, regardless of how realistic that timeline may be. While some developers complete projects like clockwork, unforeseen circumstances arise that can cause even the most experienced builder to delay a new development that was years in the making. Despite the risk involved, investors and lenders don’t have a reliable resource to determine whether a developer’s timeline to complete a project is practical or just wishful thinking.

The Real Deal’s comprehensive New York City real estate database, TRData, has used its pipeline of over 10,000 NYC projects in various stages of development to determine the average number of days it takes each developer to complete a project.

Every developer suffers from an occasional misstep when completing a project. But when all of a developer’s projects are laid out in front of you with the number of days it took for them to receive a permit, have their plan accepted by the New York state Attorney General’s office or receive their temporary certificate of occupancy, trends begin to emerge. Some of the city’s most prolific developers seem to routinely take longer to complete projects than lesser-known developers building projects of the same size in the same areas.

Using our pipeline, we can supply a list of developers and their reliability based on the actual time it took for them to complete projects. These developers can be ranked by the number of square feet they’ve completed, the number of residential, commercial and total units in their projects or the initial or current price submitted to the Attorney General’s office. We can also supply more customized lists, such as the timelines of residential projects in Williamsburg and Greenpoint that have between 10 and 25 units that were designed by a specific architect.

Click below to download a free sample of three developers and 33 of their projects in various stages of completion. The sample ranks these three developers by the number of square feet they’ve completed and includes permit filing and issuance dates for each project and the number of days between each benchmark.

Free developer ranking and timeline sample 

Contact Derek Smith at ds@therealdeal.com or (646) 503-3561 to discuss pricing and request a custom sample.