Elevated CDC · Developer Training
Take a fictional Sussex County parcel from contract to keys. Make the calls a real developer faces — contingencies, wetlands, zoning, capital, bids, the exit — and live with the consequences.
Sign in with your name, your business or organisation, and whether you develop as a nonprofit or a for-profit. Your run, your score and your place on the leaderboard follow your account.
Every run moves through the same six stages. What changes is the site, your numbers, and the decisions you make inside each stage.
Acquisition
Due Diligence
Entitlements & Utilities
Capital Stack
Design & Approvals
Build, Exit & Present
All fictional. All figures illustrative. Pick one, and the decisions that follow are the ones that site actually creates.
2.0 acres
Two farmed acres at the edge of town
Illustrative: $380K asking · 14 homes · $3.20M total development cost
1.1 acres
A constrained waterfront block with historic character
Illustrative: $620K asking · 10 homes · $4.10M total development cost
8.5 acres
8.5 rural acres of legacy farmland
Illustrative: $540K asking · 34 homes · $5.60M total development cost
Individual
Work a site at your own pace. Every decision is followed by what it actually cost you in cash, months, risk and approval readiness.
Teams
A team plays one site together, names itself, and competes on the shared leaderboard. The instructor sees every run and every decision behind it.
Your developer type is chosen when you sign up and can be changed any time. It decides which options are put in front of you and how your work is weighted.
Grants and tax-credit equity are on the table; a bulk sale to an investor is not.
Private equity and note offerings are on the table; a competitive grant round is not.
The two weightings sit either side of the programme's standing split — 30 / 25 / 20 / 15 / 10 — so a cohort of mixed developers is still comparable.
100 points, decided entirely by the choices you made. Each category compares what you picked with the best option you were actually offered on the path you took — so a hard path is not punished for what it never offered. Crises cost you points; avoiding them is part of the skill.
| Category | Nonprofit | For-profit |
|---|---|---|
| Financial feasibility | 25 | 35 |
| Due diligence & risk | 25 | 25 |
| Approvals & execution | 20 | 20 |
| Community impact | 20 | 10 |
| Final presentation | 10 | 10 |
| Total | 100 | 100 |
Grades: Master Developer 85+, Seasoned Developer 70+, Emerging Developer 55+, Developer in Training below that.
Score by category, the ending position of the project, and every decision and crisis you met.
Run the same site again on the same numbers and beat your own result — or pick a different parcel and start a new problem.
20 plain-language definitions, from ESA to will-serve letter. The ones that matter appear under each decision card too.
Your progress is saved to your own account on this device. If you sign in from another device, start a fresh run there — a run in progress does not follow you across devices.