Ground up development; apartment or senior living complex

[Jay Mitiguy]

Hello world of BP. As you guessed from the title, I'm looking for insight on how to dig into a potential ground up development opportunity I was presented with yesterday.

A little background on me: been investing for 5ish years, focused on small multi-family and some mixed use. Have successfully bought, rehabbed and sold several properties after 2-3 year holds and continue to hold a few properties that I want to keep long term. I have experience with decent sized rehabs on mixed use buildings, and put together a financing packages that included grants from the state and city where we did the work.

My question now is, how do I begin to dive into a much larger deal? I recently moved markets (and my home) and in that process came across a potential deal where the current land owner would give the land for development for equity in the deal. It's a little over 10 acres and is zoned for high density res (18 units/acre), and is 2 miles from a very well known university in NC. Being new to the area, and not fully understanding their processes for development, where would you suggest I get started? Who should I be speaking to, and how would you go about underwriting a project like this? I found an financial modeling tool on A.CRE that seems very robust, but there is a lot of data required that I don't have and honestly wouldn't know the best person to get it from.

Any input would be greatly appreciated as I hopefully take my next step into the CRE/Development playground!

Thanks - Jay