They often lend 75% or more of the purchase price, take on most of the risk, make a low return, and allow us to realize out sized returns.

@Adam Culper Adam forgive me for saying this but if you are asking these questions you may want to fall back to seriously consider if you are ready to execute a ground up development of any size

The lenders said they can only use my income in loan amount figuring if I have a credit score, so in order to take out a loan the size we were looking I need to establish credit.

Depending on size, you may be required to, typically with large scale, multimillion dollar assets.For smaller assets, i.e. single family, duplex, fourplex, you get liability protection. 

Most investors don’t have the size of team you are referring to.  

I think what I need to do is find out what size buildings would fit on the land, estimate the cost to build, determine what a lender could offer, and see if the numbers make sense.

  : ) At the end of the day, the most important piece of the puzzle is the team/partner, regardless of the size of the project, so do your due diligence on those people.

Through a combination of reading, shadowing, analyzing, and doing smaller projects and then scaling the size and complexity you'll be able to learn this faster and more deeply than any other method.It would be interesting to get some reps with this Yoda Developer and walking it all the way through with him and drawing some correlations between what he's doing in his head and reality. 

. - your max loan sizing can up to 70-75% of your appraisal on investment cashout and is NOT limited by cashflow however the cashflow you do file or can document with your lease agreements or taxes will help offset and help you qualify for the cashout as well- cash out is 6 months title seasoning through your name personally or through entities you controlled a majority stake in (51% or over)The down side on residential conventional financing is that you can only finance the properties in your personal name at closing or your living trust. 

The 2020 BiggerPockets Insights Market Study examines the 552 largest markets in the United States to help investors of all types and experience levels understand how various locales across the U.S. compare to one another.Over the next few months, we’ll be releasing more BPInsights studies similar to this one for mid-sized and small markets.