I am a real estate developer. I founded JDS Development Group in 2002 and I run it, and we build in New York City and Miami. What follows is an account of the work itself rather than of the buildings, because the buildings are documented elsewhere and the work is the part almost nobody describes.

The job is badly understood from outside, in a specific way. People assume a developer either finances buildings or designs them. Neither is right. The developer is the party who holds the whole problem, which means being accountable for decisions that depend on expertise you do not personally have, made against information that is incomplete in ways you can partly predict and partly cannot.

That accountability is what makes it a distinct discipline rather than a coordinating function. An architect owns the design. An engineer owns the structure. A contractor owns the build. Somebody has to own the question of whether the whole thing should exist in this form on this ground, and keep owning it as every input changes underneath.

I have divided it into six stages, which is a simplification. The stages overlap, they loop, and the clean sequence exists only in retrospect. But each one asks something genuinely different of the person doing it, and describing them separately is more honest than pretending it is one continuous activity.

What I have tried to avoid is the two registers this subject usually gets written in. One is procedural and reads like a manual for a process that never runs that way. The other is a war story, which is entertaining and teaches nothing transferable. I have aimed between them: what the stage actually requires, what typically goes wrong, and where I have been wrong myself.