The pro forma assumes the project gets built on budget and on schedule. The technical section is where that assumption earns its keep.
Construction risk is the first risk a development loan meets, and the technical dimension exists to test it before funding rather than during draws. The core exercise is cost validation: the sponsor’s budget benchmarked line by line against published cost data and the analyst’s comparable-project record — hard costs per square foot for the building type and region, sitework against the site’s actual conditions, soft costs as a sanity-checked share of hard costs, and contingency sized to the project’s residual design risk rather than a token percentage.
A budget that survives benchmarking still needs a builder. Contractor capability — bonding capacity, comparable completions, current backlog — belongs in the record, as does materials and labor availability in the project’s market, because a correctly priced budget executed by an overstretched contractor produces the same overrun as a wrong one. Wert-Berater’s recent aviation engagement examined precisely this: contractor capability, materials, and labor availability reviewed against the plans before the budget was accepted as actionable.
Entitlement status is binary risk wearing a schedule costume: zoning, permits, and utility commitments either exist or they are conditions precedent, and the study should say which, item by item. Schedule risk then translates to money — every month of slip is a month of carried interest and delayed revenue — so the sensitivity work includes a delayed-opening case alongside the revenue shocks.
Where a budget fails validation, the finding is stated plainly with the gap quantified. A recent medical-office engagement’s value-engineering pass cut total project cost nearly 8 percent — the productive version of the same discipline.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. 4,000+ engagements completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $41.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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