I have worked on subdivision redevelopment projects as well as single units for a span of 20+ years.

There are tons of great tools here at biggerpockets.com I am sure you can find them very useful.I personally use this free house flipping software to help with many things from number crunching, getting money worth, cost cutting, saving time, and or even getting funding for projects to contract managment and your clients or friends will love it too.

Said this project is going to last 2 years and employ about 400 people. 

To determine whether an investment is worthwhile, one might consider the opportunity cost of putting money into a real estate investment instead throwing that money into the stock market for the same period of time that you’d be invested in the real-estate project.

I have seen enough to get the gist of it, but this will be my first mail merge and bulk offer project.  

Schedule tours and ask them to make offers.The same approach applies to my 350,000sf warehouse project or the 1,000sf small user space.If you have the time and energy and willing to make the effort, you can do it. 

The project is going to be 20K of material and sweat equity.

Everything is running extremely thin and we all discussed that we need to find something we SOME leeway, especially since this is our first project. 

.$1,737/month on a $3,000 rent sounds really great to me, I don't think you want to jump out because of the 50% rule with those numbers.Your main concern is getting the project done fast and getting renters in there.

CongratulationsHow did you pay for the project?