As always, thank you for your feedback and feature ideas!
We have a great product roadmap coming together for 2021 with powerful features designed to further streamline the financial modelling for your development projects.
First up is a new feature we are calling "Forward Funding" which we have released today.
In simple terms, this feature allows you to apply forward funding to your development feasibilities. This is ideal if you have an element of the project which is not required to be funded by development finance or equity.
Let's say you are looking at a development of 20 open market apartments and 10 affordable apartments. Your unit breakdown may look something like this:
The affordable apartments are going to be purchased by a social housing provider and they have agreed to forward fund the construction of the units.
On this basis your development finance no longer needs to cover the cost of these units and also the sales proceeds should not repay your development finance. We therefore need a way to exclude these units from the finance calculation.
This is where this new feature comes in.
On the finance screen of Aprao, you can now use the forward funding menu to select any elements that are going to be forward funded. This can be either the sale of a particular unit type(s) and any build phase(s).
As you can see from the screenshot below, we have simply selected to exclude the affordable elements as forward funded.
These units will now be excluded from the finance calculations allowing us to continue with our development finance in the normal way.
In the example below, I have set the senior debt development finance at 50% of GDV (gross development value). With the affordable element excluded, this is now 50% of the open market GDV.
When it comes to the development cash flow forecast you can clearly see the forward funded right alongside the senior debt development finance.
This feature has just been released so is ready for you to log in and take a look. And if you'd like to see more platform release updates, they're all available here.
Have questions? No problem! Send them over to support@aprao.com and we will be happy to help.