A 168-unit mixed-use rental, eleven months into a twenty-two-month build. The construction platform said the job was healthy. The deal said otherwise.
Every score in this scenario is measured against this column — not against the contract, and not against the approved budget.
| Term | Underwritten | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Programme | 168 units, mixed-use rental, secondary US metro | Scale sets the absorption assumption |
| Total development cost | $84.5M · hard cost $61.2M | The denominator for every variance |
| Hard-cost contingency | $3.06M (5.0% of hard cost) | The buffer between a change and a capital call |
| Construction loan | $58.0M at ~8.4% · interest reserve $4.6M | Carry runs ≈ $406K per month fully drawn |
| Schedule | 22 months to TCO | Every week of slip is priced |
| Loan maturity | Month 30 | The hard date the deal turns on |
| Completion test | TCO achieved and 60% leased (101 units) by month 30 | Two conditions, tracked in two different places, by nobody |
| Lease-up | 12 months to 95% from TCO | The back end that decides the return |
The project team was told nothing and asked for nothing. Every input below was already being produced.
| Source | Read for | Held by |
|---|---|---|
| Construction management platform | RFI and submittal aging, change events, daily logs, ball-in-court latency | The builder |
| CPM schedule, native file | Critical path, float consumption, milestone variance | The builder |
| Cost ledger & requisition packages | Committed vs billed, contingency draws, anticipated cost report | The owner |
| Loan documents & draw history | Interest-reserve burn, covenant thresholds, completion-test terms | The owner |
| Municipal filing portal | Sign-off status of record, agency queue position | Nobody. It is public. |
The last row is the one that matters. Four of these five sources are inside the project. The fifth is outside it — and it is the one that produced the finding no participant could have reported, because no participant was looking.
Each one priced against the underwriting, named to a seat, and carried on the record from first signal.
At 58% complete, $2.11M of the $3.06M hard-cost contingency had been drawn — 69% consumed against 58% of the work. The budget report showed contingency "within tolerance," which was true of the level and false of the trajectory. Projected forward at the observed rate, the buffer exhausts at 84% complete, around month 16 — leaving roughly six months of construction with no contingency at all.
Requisition #11 billed 61% of hard cost cumulatively. Independent verification at the monthly walk put work genuinely in place at 52% — a $5.5M cumulative gap. Of the $4.2M requested in that cycle, $1.4M–$2.2M represented work not yet performed. The lender's inspector had signed the prior two draws without the discrepancy surfacing.
The certificate-of-occupancy path carried 41 sign-off items. The builder's closeout tracker showed 34 of them "on plan" and 7 open. ClaimZero checked all 41 against the municipal filing portal — the public record, not the tracker. Nine of the 34 had no filing of record. They had never been submitted.
Two of the nine carried agency review queues exceeding 90 days: the elevator final and the sprinkler hydrostatic sign-off. Recomputed against actual queue position rather than the tracker's assumption, the achievable TCO date moved 11 weeks later.
Tour-to-application conversion and deposit velocity implied a lease-up of about 19 months to stabilisation against the 12 months underwritten. On its own this reads as a marketing problem to solve after opening. Against the loan it is not.
The Project Risk Index scores trajectory, not level. It rose as findings landed and fell as the owner closed them — which is the only behaviour that makes a weekly number worth reading.
| Week | Index | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 44 | Baseline established from ingest |
| 2 | 47 | Contingency trajectory flagged |
| 3 | 57 | Billed vs verified gap confirmed at the walk |
| 4 | 59 | Requisition held pending reconciliation |
| 5 | 61 | Certificate-path audit opened |
| 6 | 68 | Nine unfiled sign-offs confirmed against public record |
| 7 | 67 | Nine items filed |
| 8 | 64 | Two long-lead queues confirmed and scheduled |
| 9 | 62 | Completion test re-forecast with lender |
| 10 | 63 | Absorption held below plan a further month |
| 11 | 58 | Extension option agreed at 25 bps |
| 12 | 55 | $900K soft-cost contingency reallocated |
| 13 | 53 | Draw cycle reconciled, no further gap |
| 14 | 51 | Trajectory negative for four consecutive weeks |
ClaimZero does not run the project. It produced the page; the owner made the calls.
Held requisition #11 pending reconciliation. $1.6M deferred to the following cycle rather than funding work not in place. The CM was given the verification detail, not an accusation.
Filed the nine missing sign-off items. Because this happened in month 11 rather than month 20, the 90-day agency queues were absorbed into remaining float instead of consuming it.
Re-forecast the completion test with the lender — nineteen months before maturity. The conversation was a re-forecast, not a workout.
Agreed a 90-day extension option at 25 basis points. Priced as an option on a performing loan, because that is what it was.
Reallocated $900K of unspent soft-cost contingency to hard-cost buffer. Restoring roughly three months of runway to the exhausting line.
Nothing about the project changes. Only the date of discovery changes.
We will read your active project files and show you what the same four domains return on a real development. Institutional sponsors can convert the demonstration into an onboarding pilot.