We didn't invent this process. We learned it, project by project.
The development playbook below is the actual sequence Dan ran as a partner at a national build-to-rent fund from 2020 to 2025, project after project. That fund closed in 2025, and its projects in development were sold to Dissonant Capital. It's a real, proven process, not something we're claiming to have built from a blank page, and we think that's worth being upfront about. What follows is the sequence a project runs through, land to lease-up, and the real cost of the times it didn't go as planned.
359 townhomes, four markets, all entitled.
The same twelve steps now run on Cadence Fund I: four fully entitled build-to-rent land positions, ready for the build phase. Nothing has been built yet, and site plans may change before construction. See Cadence Fund I →
Units to be developed, by market
Tap or hover a segment to see each position’s share.
Land to lease-up, the same twelve steps every time.
Skipping a step, or rushing it, is how a project loses six weeks or six figures. Here's the sequence, in order.
Land Acquisition
Zoning flexibility, utility access at the lot line, and a motivated seller matter more than the number on the listing. On one deal, that meant evaluating more than forty sites before the right one closed.
Entitlement
The slowest, least visible step, and the one most likely to blow a schedule. An eleven-month entitlement on one project included a traffic study and three separate neighborhood meetings before approval.
Conceptual Plans
The first honest look at how many units a site can actually hold, once fire access, tree protection, and required setbacks are drawn in, not the number in the original pitch. One project's unit count dropped from 146 to 119 at this stage.
Working with Architects
The same lot and the same unit count can carry a swing of thousands of dollars per unit depending on the design choices an architect makes, often with no visible difference in the finished building.
Civil Engineers
Unglamorous and easy to underfund, civil engineering decides where the water goes. Getting it right can be the difference between a required stormwater vault and a cheaper, creative workaround; one deal avoided a $400,000 vault this way.
City Submissions & Revisions
Plans rarely clear a city on the first pass. One project needed five separate submission rounds before approval, each one a chance to lose more weeks to redlines.
Construction Documents
The last, fully coordinated set of plans before a shovel goes in the ground. Miss one detail, like a single retaining wall, and it can cost weeks and six figures to fix mid-construction; one project lost three weeks and $147,000 to exactly that.
Finding & Vetting Builders
The cheapest bid isn't always the safest one. On one deal, a general contractor bidding 10% below the field was already in litigation elsewhere; the higher bidder delivered.
Construction Contracts
Three structures cover almost every deal: a guaranteed maximum price, a fixed bid, or cost-plus, each shifting the risk of overruns between developer and contractor differently.
Financing
A capital stack is rarely one lender and one investor. Construction loans, seller financing, and limited-partner equity get layered so no single source has to carry the whole deal, and no partner gets diluted more than they should.
Construction
Where most of the profit is actually made or lost, and where weekly discipline, photos, budget tracking, scrutinizing every change order, pays for itself. One project lost six weeks when a single framing subcontractor's window was missed.
Lease-Up or Exit
The right broker, a staged model unit, and real marketing, not just a sign, can be the difference between limping to stabilization and pre-leasing before the doors open; one community hit 40% pre-leased before completion.
This is the execution half of the process. The diligence that decides which deals get this far in the first place lives on How We Underwrite.
“Skipping a step, or rushing it, is how a project loses six weeks or six figures.”
Every plan gets checked against the site, not just the schedule, before it moves to the next step.
Five mistakes, and what they cost.
Every one of these came from a real project at that fund, not a hypothetical. Names, locations, and people are protected. The numbers aren't.
Six figures and six weeks add up
Switch views to see the dollar cost and the units lost.
The utility line that wasn't there
A site cleared every other check, until the nearest sewer connection turned out to be more than 2,100 feet away, across wetlands and a rail line. Directional drilling and permitting closed the gap, at a price that erased the deal's margin.
Rezoned out of relevance
Entitlements stayed intact, but a zoning overlay change during the hold period made the approved plan impossible to build as designed. The forced redesign consumed the profit the deal was underwritten to deliver.
The contractor that ghosted
A general contractor walked off a project mid-construction. Rebidding the remaining work from scratch, on a schedule that had already slipped, cost far more than staying with a slower, better-vetted builder would have.
The stormwater spiral
A closer read of the site's topography, done after entitlement instead of before, surfaced retention and easement requirements nobody had priced in. The unit count that made the deal work on paper didn't survive the actual grading plan.
When lease-up became a letdown
Three competing communities opened in the same submarket within months of each other. Rents dropped, absorption crawled, and a project underwritten to stabilize quickly was still leasing up nearly a year later.
Every one of these happened at that fund, before Dissonant Capital existed. Diligence, the process on How We Underwrite, is how we catch them earlier next time.
Where this fits inside Dissonant Capital today.
This page describes an operating process and a historical track record from a build-to-rent fund, unaffiliated with Dissonant Capital, where Dan Kaufman was a partner from 2020 to 2025. That fund closed in 2025 and sold its projects in development to Dissonant Capital. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security. Any future offer relating to Resolve Fund I, Cadence Fund I, or any other Dissonant Capital vehicle will be made only by means of definitive offering documents, and only to investors who meet applicable eligibility and suitability requirements. Statements regarding process, pipeline, or anticipated performance are forward-looking, inherently uncertain, and actual results may differ materially.