ABSTRACT
The city and the Tower of Babel were never completed. The story teaches an important lesson about unity, working together among diverse groups of people, the role of complexity in creating confusion and the sin of excessive pride. Real estate developers take high stakes gambles on their projects, with substantial investments of their time, focus, energies and money, alongside funding from general and limited partner equity providers and lenders, with risky financial, performance guarantees provided by developer principals. Moving development projects from finding a site to construction is, by necessity, function of understanding complex processes, orchestrating the parties, attending to the details, making critical decisions in real time along the way. The Tower of Babel story could easily be set in modem times—with land brokers, development associates, development companies, real estate attorneys, title companies, surveyors, consultants, lenders, equity partners—real estate development, from concept to architecture, development to construction, finance and sale is a massive endeavor with multiple parties, complexity, confusion.
