Attua / Industries / Property developers
AI for land and residential developers
A development is a documents business with dirt attached. So this page is organised by document: the artefacts a project actually runs on, who has to read each one, and which parts of the reading and writing can be carried for them.
Book a discovery callThe premise
Where a small development team really spends its week
Most developers I speak to have a lean internal team and a long list of consultants. The internal team is 4 to 12 people: a couple of development managers, a project coordinator, someone on sales and settlements, finance. The planners, engineers, surveyors, quantity surveyors and builders are external. Which means the developer's actual job, day to day, is holding information together between other people's documents.
That shows up as a very particular kind of week. Reading a decision notice to work out what has to happen before earthworks can start. Checking a progress claim against a contract somebody else drafted. Finding out whether a consultant's report answered the question the council asked. Pulling a lender pack together from 6 sources on the day it is due.
None of that is development judgement. The judgement is whether to buy the site, what to build, what to pay and when to go. Everything between those decisions is document handling at a volume that a team of 8 cannot keep ahead of, which is why projects quietly carry a 3 week lag on information that nobody budgets for.
The data room
The documents a project runs on, one at a time
Document 01
Read by: development manager, acquisitions, the board
The due diligence pack
Title searches, survey plans, easements, the planning scheme and every overlay that touches the site, flood mapping, contamination and acid sulfate soils, services advice, and whatever the vendor has disclosed. Assembling it for a single site takes a development manager the better part of a week, and most sites assembled do not proceed.
That ratio is the argument. A first pass pack per candidate site, drawn from the public sources and the vendor material, lets the team spend its week on the sites worth a week. A site that fails on an overlay should fail in an afternoon.
What draftsThe pack, the overlay summary, the questions each report leaves unanswered, and a list of what has to be verified by a professional.
Document 02
Read by: directors, the lender, the investment committee
The feasibility model
Built in Feastudy, EstateMaster or a spreadsheet that has been in the business for 15 years, and it carries every assumption that matters. Nothing we build touches it, generates numbers for it, or produces anything that could be mistaken for its output.
What is useful sits beside the model. Keeping the inputs current: the latest quantity surveyor estimate, the current consultant fee commitments, the infrastructure charges position, the sales rates actually being achieved. And flagging where the model's assumption no longer matches a document in the data room, which is the failure mode that hurts.
What draftsThe input register, and an exception list where a live document contradicts a modelled assumption.
Document 03
Read by: town planner, development manager, council
The development application and what comes back
An application under the Planning Act goes in with a planning report and a stack of consultant material, and then the correspondence starts: information requests from the assessment manager, state referrals, submissions from neighbours, and the slow process of responding to each.
The response work is coordination. Which consultant owes what, by when, and whether the answer they sent actually addresses what was asked. Submissions from the public need reading and categorising, and on a contentious project there may be hundreds saying 11 different things.
What draftsInformation request response trackers, submission themes grouped by issue, and a status read on what is outstanding with which consultant.
Document 04
Read by: everyone, eventually, usually too late
The decision notice and its conditions
This is the worst document in the industry and the best candidate for this work. A decision notice can run to 60 pages with well over a hundred conditions, each with a trigger: before operational works, before plan sealing, prior to the commencement of use. Miss one and a project stops at exactly the point stopping is most expensive.
Most teams build a conditions register by hand. One person reads the notice and types each condition into a spreadsheet with a trigger and an owner, over several days, and the register is only as good as that afternoon's concentration. Extracting the conditions, grouping them by trigger and proposing an owner for each is mechanical work that a person then verifies line by line against the notice.
What draftsThe conditions register with triggers and owners proposed, and a weekly view of what is due before the next milestone.
Document 05
Read by: development manager, finance
Consultant agreements and the fee schedule
A dozen consultants, each with a scope, a fee, a set of exclusions and a variation history. Fee creep happens one small variation at a time, and it is usually discovered when the project's consultant line is compared against the feasibility at the wrong moment.
Comparing fee proposals on a consistent basis, tracking commitments against the budget line, and surfacing variations as they arrive rather than at month end is reconciliation work. It also makes the next project's budget better, because you have a real record of what each discipline actually cost.
What draftsFee proposal comparisons, a commitment register against budget, and variation summaries as they arrive.
Document 06
Read by: project manager, quantity surveyor, lender
The construction contract and progress claims
Claims arrive monthly with supporting documentation and have to be checked against the contract, the programme and what is actually built. Your quantity surveyor certifies, the lender drawdowns follow, and the paperwork for each drawdown is its own small project.
The useful work is assembly and checking for completeness: whether the claim includes what the contract requires, whether the supporting documents are attached, whether anything claimed was already claimed. Certification stays with the quantity surveyor and contract interpretation stays with your lawyers.
What draftsClaim completeness checks, drawdown document packs, and a plain summary of what each claim covers.
Document 07
Read by: sales, settlements, the lender
Presale contracts and the sales report
Presales matter to the lender before they matter to anyone else, and qualifying presales have conditions attached. Meanwhile contracts sit at various stages: signed, deposit paid, finance clause, unconditional. Agents report inconsistently, and the weekly sales position is assembled by somebody chasing 3 agencies.
Consolidating agent reporting into one position, tracking contract status and deposits, and drafting the buyer updates that keep people calm during a long build is administration. Anything about a settlement date, a sunset date or a contract term goes to a person every time.
What draftsThe consolidated weekly sales and contract position, and buyer progress updates for a person to approve.
Document 08
Read by: the lender, investors, the board
The reporting pack
Monthly or quarterly, pulling together construction progress, cost to complete, sales position, approval status and the risks. It is due on a date, it takes 2 days, and it is assembled from the same sources every time by the person least able to spare 2 days.
A drafted pack from the registers and reports that already exist, in the format each audience expects, leaves the development manager writing the commentary and the judgement. Which is the only part the reader is actually relying on them for.
What draftsThe pack itself, with the commentary left blank for a person to write rather than generated.
Hard limits
What stays with the development manager and the professionals
Development decisions carry money and legal exposure in large amounts, and some of the documents involved create obligations to buyers. So the exclusions are firm.
Not drafted, not suggested, not assisted
Each of these is either a professional judgement, a legal obligation or a representation to a third party. A plausible sentence in the wrong one of them is a dispute.
- Any feasibility conclusion, residual land value, return figure or decision to proceed
- Interpretation of an approval condition, a contract term or a planning instrument
- Disclosure statements and anything else required before a buyer signs
- Any statement to a buyer about settlement timing, sunset dates or what they are entitled to
- Certification of a progress claim, or any judgement about whether work is complete
- Environmental, geotechnical or engineering conclusions, which belong to the professional who signs them
- Communications with a council, a referral agency or a regulator that a person has not written
What remains is extraction, assembly, comparison, tracking and first drafts. On a live project that is a very large share of the hours, and it is where the 3 week information lag comes from.
Queensland
The Queensland machinery a project has to move through
Each of those produces documents, dates and correspondence. The tracking is administration. The decisions and the interpretations are not, and the split is the same throughout this page.
Systems
Platforms a developer and its project team use
- Feastudy, EstateMaster or your feasibility model
- Read for input currency and exception checking only. No workflow writes to it or produces figures for it.
- Aconex, Procore or your project document register
- Where consultant deliverables, information requests and correspondence live, and where most of the extraction value sits.
- Landchecker, Nearmap and the Queensland spatial data
- Site screening packs with overlays, lot configuration and recent nearby approvals assembled per candidate.
- Council development tracking and decision notices
- Conditions extracted into a register with triggers and owners proposed, verified by a person against the notice.
- Your sales platform and agent reporting
- Contract status, deposits and the weekly consolidated sales position drafted in one shape.
- Xero, MYOB or your project accounting
- Consultant commitments against budget, variation tracking, and drawdown document packs assembled on time.
How it runs
Running a Diagnostic across a live project
A Diagnostic comes first and the best way to run it is on a project currently in the ground, with one in planning alongside it. Several days with the development managers and the project coordinator, reading the real documents rather than a process diagram, and a session with finance on the reporting cycle.
The output is a short sequence, the exclusions in writing, and an honest view on whether your document structure can support any of it yet. Where a data room is genuinely disorganised, fixing that comes first and I will say so, because extraction from chaos produces confident nonsense.
Then one workflow, 4 to 6 weeks, on a live project with the old method running beside it. The condition register is the usual starting point because it is verifiable: every extracted condition can be checked against the notice, so you find out quickly whether the output is trustworthy. For the wider sequence see AI strategy, with the build in AI implementation.
Illustrative example, not a client story
Example scenario: a decision notice with 120 conditions
Picture a residential subdivision approved in stages, with a decision notice running to 58 pages and about 120 conditions. The project coordinator spends 3 days reading it and typing each condition into a spreadsheet with a trigger and an owner. Partway through, the format drifts, and 2 conditions attached to plan sealing end up filed against operational works.
In this example the conditions are extracted into the register automatically, each one quoted verbatim with its page and clause reference, grouped by trigger and with an owner proposed from the project team. The coordinator verifies all 120 against the notice in half a day, correcting the handful read wrongly, and the register is then live rather than a document that ages. What has not changed is who decides what a condition means and who is accountable for clearing each one. Illustrative example, not a client story.
Data
Buyer information, deposits and commercial confidence
A development holds two quite different sensitive categories. The first is buyer information: names, contact details, identity documents, finance status and the deposit position. That is personal information under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles, and your sales agents and solicitors hold parts of it too.
The second is commercial. A feasibility model, a land acquisition strategy, a construction tender price and a lender term sheet would all be valuable to a competitor or a vendor. In practice that means tighter handling than the privacy obligations alone would require.
How it is set up: business grade accounts with training on your data switched off, each workflow scoped to one register or one project folder rather than the whole data room, identity documents and buyer finance material excluded from scope entirely, and trust money untouched because it sits with your agent and your solicitor where it belongs. Where a joint venture agreement or a lender facility imposes confidentiality terms, that project is excluded unless the terms are met. Your team also needs a written rule on what may be put where, which is AI training and worth doing before the first build.
Every job is scoped up front after a Diagnostic. Sam is based in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and travel is charged at cost from Brisbane. See the cost guide.
Questions
Common questions from development managers and directors
Can it find sites for us?
It can do the first screen, which is where the hours go. Listings, zoning, overlays, lot configuration and recent nearby approvals assembled into a short pack per candidate site, so a development manager spends their day on the 4 worth looking at rather than the 40 that were never going to work. The judgement about whether a site is a project stays yours.
Will it touch the feasibility?
No. The feasibility is the single document everything else depends on, its assumptions carry the risk, and prose generated numbers have no place anywhere near it. What a workflow can do is assemble the inputs so the model is built on current information, and flag where an assumption in the model no longer matches a quote, a contract or an approval condition.
What is the single best first project?
Nine times out of ten it is the condition register. A decision notice runs to dozens of pages and well over a hundred conditions, each with a trigger and an owner, and most projects track them in a spreadsheet built by whoever had the time. Extracting them into a register a person then verifies is the clearest return available on this list.
Our project team is mostly consultants. Does that change anything?
It makes the coordination work more valuable, not less. If your engineers, planners, surveyors and project managers are external, the developer's real job is holding the information together between them, and that is exactly what these workflows do. It also means data handling has to be agreed with each consultant rather than assumed.
Can it answer buyer enquiries on a release?
The factual part, drafted for your sales team to send: what is available, the lot sizes, the inclusions, what stage construction has reached. Anything about a settlement date, a sunset date, a contract term or a disclosure obligation goes to a person, because a casual sentence about timing can become a representation you have to honour.
We run two projects at a time, not twenty. Is this worth it?
Sometimes, and it depends on who is doing the work. A developer with a small internal team and complex approvals often gains more than a larger group with a project controls function already in place. If the honest answer is that a project coordinator and a better document structure would serve you better, I will say that during the Diagnostic.
Talk it through with Sam
Book a 30 minute discovery call about how your business runs today.
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