The Book
Make It Pencil
Real Estate Concepts and Cases
Every real estate deal comes down to one question. Does it pencil?
Most of the time the honest answer is almost. Closing the gap takes more than a spreadsheet. Behind every number sits an economic model, a legal document, and a person who knows something you do not. This book puts the economics and the arithmetic on the same page as the law and the people.
19
Chapters
15
Cases
332
Pages
A Casebook with a Voice
Every concept in the book is put to work in a case.
The cases share one universe. You follow Meridian Residential Partners through a market it cannot crack, land negotiations, contracts, capital raises, a lease-up that misses, a loan that matures at the wrong moment, and a fund that must choose between its investors' money and its own future. The people recur and the consequences carry forward. Every exhibit can be rebuilt by hand, and every case ends with a decision you have to defend.
Do the cases.
The chapters will make you feel like you understand; only the cases will tell you whether you do. When a case ends with "write the memo," write the memo.
Foot the exhibits.
Every table reproduces from stated assumptions with arithmetic you learned in school. When an exhibit says a deal yields 6.6% against a 7.0% hurdle, multiply it out yourself.
Argue with the assumptions.
Each exhibit states its assumptions in the open and tells you they are attackable. The sophisticated investor knows which cell the whole answer lives in.
Contents
What's inside
Part I
The Operating System
How to think about the asset class before touching a deal: the economics underneath, the law underneath that, and the numbers that lie.
- 1
Real Estate Is Applied Economics
- 2
Real Estate Is Law
Case: The Millbrook Apartments
- 3
Numbers That Lie
Case: The Comp Set
Part II
Land
Finding it, reading it, controlling it: markets, assemblages, contracts, and the largest landowner in the country.
- 4
Picking the Market
Case: Breaking into Baymouth
- 5
Assemblage
Case: The Kostas Offer
- 6
Anatomy of a Transaction
Case: The Hillside Closing
- 7
The Public Landowner
Case: The Depot Yards
Part III
The Building
What gets built and why: the code that writes the skyline, and the economics hiding inside the walls.
- 8
Building Types and the Development Math
Case: The Prototype Decision
- 9
Inside the Box: Unit Mix and Parking
- •
Interlude: Two Hundred Years of How America Builds
Part IV
Capital
The money and its rules: the stack, the leverage, the machine behind the mortgage, the building after the ribbon, and the game above the deals.
- 10
Who Owns the Building
Case: The Waterfall
- 11
Leverage and the Ten-Year
Case: The Maturity
- 12
The Machine Behind the Mortgage
- 13
The Asset After the Ribbon
Case: The First Twelve Months
- 14
The Owner's Chair
Case: The Two-Bedroom Problem
- 15
The Game Above the Deals
Case: Year Eight
Part V
Time
Cycles, constraints, and the instruments of the new era: the clocks every building is on, and the shop that keeps score.
- 16
The Filtering Clock and the Redevelopment Option
Case: The Covered Land Play
- 17
The Constraint Era
Case: The Substation
- 18
The AI-Native Shop
Case: The Model and the Committee
- 19
How to Be Early
Back matter: Appendix: The Analyst's Toolkit, Sources, Index.
Free Sample
Read the Introduction, Chapter 8 and The Prototype Decision
Meridian has a 10-acre parcel under contract and a three-column pro forma. Its chief investment officer has to approve one prototype before any design dollars are spent.
- Author
- Anthony Kifue
- Format
- Paperback, 6 x 9 in
- Pages
- 332
- ISBN
- 9798160397917
- Published
- Independently published, 2026