Development
01How many units must be pre-sold before construction starts?
A practical guide to setting pre-sales thresholds using lender conditions, funding gaps, buyer deposits, cancellation buffers, and sales velocity.
26 June 202613 min read ↗
Essays / Field notes
Thinking in public.
Long-form notes for practitioners who want to understand not only what happened, but why a real estate decision made sense.
The Development
Playbook
Playbook
Field notes / Essays and arguments
Land · Capital · Design · Delivery · Operations
Start here / Featured essay
Architecture · 15 min read
Architecture after the feasibility
Design is not decoration added after the model works. It is one of the mechanisms by which the model works.
Read the essay →Reading paths
Choose the question you bring.
The same development decision looks different from the design desk, investment committee, site office, and city street.
01 / Developers
Start with the funding gate.
Understand how pre-sales, lender conditions, deposits, and sales velocity determine whether construction can begin.
02 / Investors
Compare capital choices.
Test ownership against renting and investing the difference rather than treating property purchase as an automatic answer.
03 / Architects
Follow design into feasibility.
See architecture as one of the mechanisms through which the development model creates value and resilience.
04 / Students & urbanists
Read Nairobi as a system.
Trace the city’s shift from one dominant centre toward a connected network of specialised urban nodes.
Editorial index
All field notes
5 essays
Capital
02Rent vs buy: when renting and investing beats buying
A decision guide for comparing home ownership with renting and investing the deposit, monthly savings, and avoided transaction costs.
26 June 20268 min read ↗
Urban Growth
03Nairobi is becoming a network of cities
An illustrated field note on Nairobi’s shift from one dominant centre toward a connected constellation of specialised urban nodes.
25 June 202612 min read ↗
Practice
04Why I gravitated to finance from architecture
I did not move away from architecture. I followed its questions into land, capital, risk, and the wider system that determines what gets built.
25 June 202613 min read ↗