Growing

Property Finder

Acquiring and redeveloping a building, through a fifteen-stage lifecycle that puts the cheap questions before the expensive ones.

3 min readOpen it in the app →Included from Growth

On this page

The fifteen stages
Due diligence and stop-deal warnings
The capital stack

The fifteen stages

Property acquisition is the longest and most expensive process in this software, and the order of the stages is the point. Everything that can kill a deal cheaply is asked before anything that costs money to find out.

The Property Finder page showing property records with their deal stage, ownership evidence and availability confidence — Property Finder, organized around the fifteen-stage acquisition lifecycle.

Stage	The question it answers
Need Identification	What do we actually need space for.
Organizational Readiness	Are we in a position to own a building at all.
Opportunity Discovery	What is out there.
Preliminary Screening	Which of these are worth a second look.
Ownership & Disposition Research	Who owns it, and can it even be transferred.
Government Engagement	What do the people who control it want.
Preliminary Feasibility	Could this work, roughly.
Conditional Site Control	Can we hold it while we find out properly.
Full Due Diligence	What is actually wrong with it.
Deal Structuring	How is this transaction shaped.
Capital Stack Development	Where does every dollar come from.
Approval & Closing	Board, funders, lawyers, signatures.
Rehabilitation & Construction	Making it usable.
Occupancy & Activation	Moving in and opening.
Ongoing Compliance	Everything ownership obliges you to forever.

Due diligence and stop-deal warnings

Due diligence is organized by category rather than as one flat list, and some findings are marked as stop-deal warnings: things that should end your interest rather than be negotiated around.

Each property also records how confident you are in two separate things: the evidence of who owns it, and whether it is genuinely available. Those are different questions, and a property with strong ownership evidence and no real availability has wasted more nonprofit time than any other category.

The capital stack

The tool keeps the cost side and the funding side separately: budget line items for what it will cost, capital stack sources for where the money comes from. The gap between them is the number that matters, and keeping them apart is what makes it visible.

Every source records its own certainty, the same way Revenue Portfolio does. A committed grant and a hoped-for one are not the same dollar.
Include the costs people forget: carrying costs during construction, furniture, technology, moving, and the first year of higher utilities.
Record the ongoing compliance obligations when you take the money, not when somebody asks. Property funding usually comes with decades of them.