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Industries · Infrastructure

Construction, real estate and infrastructure

How buildings and infrastructure get planned, financed, built and owned: developers, contractors, investors and REITs, cap rates and occupancy, why large projects run over budget, how public-private partnerships work, and how to read giga-projects in the Gulf with a neutral eye.

37 min3 lessons Last reviewed
Start lesson 1 How construction and real estate work: who builds, who owns, who pays

Key takeaways

  • Real estate has two businesses that are easy to confuse. Developing and building is a project business: take risk, build, sell or hand over, earn a margin.
  • A developer earns the gap between sale value and total cost, and that gap is small compared with the total.
  • Construction and real estate cases usually ask whether to build or buy, how to fix a loss-making contractor, how to value or reposition a property, or how to deliver a large public project.
By the end you will be able to
  • Explain the roles of landowners, developers, contractors, lenders, investors and operators
  • Calculate a developer's margin and the effect of a cost overrun
  • Value a property with net operating income and a cap rate, and explain why values fall when cap rates rise
  • Explain why large projects often run late and over budget, and how PPPs share risk
  • Crack typical construction and real estate cases, starting with the right driver

Lessons

1

How construction and real estate work: who builds, who owns, who pays

The chain from land to a finished, rented building; how each player earns money; the asset types; and the metrics that matter.

12 min
2

Real estate economics and project delivery: margins, cap rates, overruns and PPPs

A developer's margin, how cap rates set values, why projects overrun, how the construction supply chain works, and how PPPs share risk.

14 min
3

Construction and real estate players, trends 2024 to 2026, and how to crack the cases

Who the players are by region, what changed from 2024 to 2026 (including Gulf giga-projects, framed neutrally), regulation basics, prompts, traps and drills.

11 min

Worked cases in this module

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Key terms