It is hard to imagine taking the initial steps toward your dream of a new custom facility three years before move in. That is cruel and unusual punishment. It is like telling mom and dad what you want for your 13th birthday… when you are 10! But,  the wheels often need to start turning that far in advance. Let’s dive a bit deeper into the timeline and see why it takes so long. I prefer to work backwards since the later stages of the process are much easier to define. As we dissect the schedule you will see more clearly what I mean.

You are all moved into your new facility and seeing your first clients or patients today. It is Monday, January 2nd, 2023. Your family, friends and clients likely wondered when this day might finally arrive. But, no one labored over it more than you. It was a long road full of patience, worry, endurance, and faith. Hard to believe the slab was poured on April 1. 2022, nine months ago (cool thing to happen on April Fools Day). But, that was not the start of construction. Two months earlier, on February 1, 2022, the site contractors mobilized onsite to start moving dirt. That was the official groundbreaking. Eight months before that, or June 1, 2021, you hired a civil engineer and an architect to begin planning the site layout and infrastructure, the building design, and the interior floor plan, as well as making all of the interior design selections. You recall you hired those team members at the start of your land contract feasibility period, but prior to that you were evaluating potential sites with your broker. You hired that broker to begin the search on March 1, 2021 and finding the right site plus negotiating the deal took three months. Now your memory is getting really foggy.  A lot happened over those 22 months. You started planning this project with your developer/builder team six months prior to searching for land. That pre-development planning process is often overlooked, or rushed, but it is critical. You did it correctly, working through demographics, financial modeling, business planning, etc., and all of that was fed into the real estate model, and decisions about the development strategy were made. Wow! That was September 1, 2020. If only you could remember how long before that you originally had this fantastic idea!

This sample timeline is a reasonable demonstration of the time needed for a ground up project on unimproved land. Various factors such as differences in municipalities, availability of land, supply and demand of products and labor resulting from the activity level in the construction market, can add or subtract months from this timeline. As mentioned at the beginning, it’s not usually the nine months to a year of actual construction that cause the uncertain timelines. Events like rain or changes requested by the client can delay that part of the schedule, but the construction timeline itself is much more definable. The real uncertainties occur during zoning, permitting,and environmental quality approval by the state. These steps require governmental agencies, and their timeline almost never matches yours. 

I have been involved in projects that were started and finished in less than a year and a half, and I have also seen them take four years to complete. Each has its own life. For this very reason it is best to begin working with a developer/builder long before you might have previously believed necessary. It is a far better scenario to have started too early, bumping out the project start date as desired, instead of trying to build to an unrealistic goal date and setting the project up for disappointing results. Once those dominoes start to fall, the already complex process becomes frustrating and painful. Start early. You won’t be sorry.

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