costs and timelines for land development in LA

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Hello all! I am helping my architect brother raise private funds from family to start developing vacant lots into new single family homes that he will designm. The target area is north eastern Los Angeles and its suburbs (Glendale, Pasadena, South Pasadena, Mount Washington neighborhood, Studio City, Hollywood Hills. I took a stab at coming up with a budget and timeline from land purchase to closing on sale. I made the mistake of using my own new home construction in a suburb of Chicago for my timeline and site improvement costs. Much of the available vacant land in our price range is hillside. Using a the high end estimates from rough land development budget I found online, I determined I should expect site improvement costs to get the land ready to build to be $100k-$150k. I gasped and then adjusted my budget accordingly. What blew up my whole plan was learning that it can take 1.5 to 3 years to get plans approved by city planning department and local neighborhood approval committees. I wanted to know what any of you who work in the LA area have found the site improvement costs to be and how long it takes to get through the planning and permitting process. I also wanted to know what your recommended strategy would be to get this type of business started: buy 2-3 lots in year 1 and then stagger the site improvement process by a year, buying about 3 lots each subsequent year to have in the hopper? I also realize that there are upfront costs for due diligence on the lot prior to purchasing to determine build ability that can be pretty high (10k). I am just trying to create an investment schedule for investors to determine how much I should ask for ( and the sky is not the limit here). To give you an idea, I had determined I would need $250K in cash to get land and construction loans with 20% down and to fund holding costs over total timeframe from buying land to closed sale of 24 months for 1500 sq ft home built at $200/sq ft, sell for $750k. This was before I was enlightened on site improvement costs and timelines. Any help from anyone who will be kind enough to not call me an idiot would be appreciated. Basically how would you set this up to be generating at least 1 build a year, minimizing the amount of money requested and the length of time we held our investors’s money hostage without a return.