Depending on their experience and integrity, this number may or may not be close to the real NOI for the project.

Good news, you get a city employee to oversee you project.

The market has definitely gotten hotter, cap rates have compressed, and more and more people continue to overpay just to "get in the game" which makes it worse for everyone.That being said, we continue to find deals that meet our strict criteria and project very attractive numbers for our investors. 

Alfred Litton I’d say 6-9 months of either gross rent projections or PITI.

However - I waned on the project because of the amount of cap-ex and maintenance required.

This is a major renovation that would include interior and exterior projects.

At some point a surge of vacancy seems logical as more of the displaced homeowners resettle into their homes and the new inventory keeps getting added.The wildcard of it all is, how much new demand that will fill the vacancies at rates based on projected population growth. 

A great place to educate yourself is the SFMTA website where all the projects they are currently working on are listed.https://www.sfmta.com/projectsThe other way you could speculate is by following sheer density, such as Mission Bay or Potrero Hill where there are a lot of new developments going up - almost endlessly.

But I also was stood up a number of times, or had contractors come take a look and tell me the project was too big.  

You won't know TRUE cost/SF until the project is built.In our market, we use cost/SF as a back-end development metric.