How Epex Consulting de-risked a 20-unit infill townhome development on the front end — feasibility, entitlement coordination, civil document review, and investor analysis, with no builder in the room.
Infill development is where the ground fights back. A 20-unit townhome project on a Dallas infill site carries risk long before the first slab: title and easement exposure, flood-plain and detention reality, the civil approach to utilities and drainage, entitlement and zoning conditions that can quietly reshape the yield, and a budget that has to survive contact with current market pricing. Any one of these can turn a deal that pencils on a napkin into a deal that loses money in the ground.
The owner group needed to know whether the deal actually worked — not the optimistic version, the real one — and they needed to know it while changes were still free. That is the entire value of front-end work: the most profitable construction decisions are made before construction, when budget, entitlements, and scope can still be moved on paper instead of in concrete.
Epex Consulting worked owner-side and owner-side only. No general contractor was involved, by design. When the party running the feasibility has no construction contract to win, the recommendation carries no builder margin and no incentive to keep quiet about a problem. The owners got the numbers, in writing — and the freedom to walk if the numbers said walk.
Title, easements, flood plain, detention, utility tie-ins, and the civil approach — the site-work costs first-time infill developers underestimate most, priced honestly rather than hoped away.
Current zoning, conditional-use exposure, variance risk, and deed restrictions — mapped against the intended 20-unit yield so no entitlement surprise showed up after the land closed.
The civil set read for completeness and for the gaps that surface later as change orders — drainage, grading, and utility routing checked before they became field problems.
A line-by-line reality check against current market pricing, soft-cost coverage, and contingency, run through the investors’ underwriting so the return case rested on real numbers, not placeholders.
Walk away, renegotiate, or proceed with conditions — stated plainly, with the dollar and schedule impact of each issue attached. No hedging.
“The most profitable construction decisions are made before construction. Feasibility work exists to find the problems that are cheap on paper and expensive in the ground.”
The feasibility review is the highest-return line item in your budget. A 20-minute call tells you whether your deal is worth a full look.
Book a Project Review