Why Your New Apartment or Coffee Shop Takes So Long to Get Built

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Date:

14 Jul 2026

If you have ever watched an empty lot sit untouched for months, permit sign flapping in the wind, no workers in sight, and wondered what is taking so long, the answer may have less to do with lumber prices or labor shortages than you think. A growing number of development professionals argue that a quieter problem is adding weeks or even months to the timeline before construction even starts: the industry has no shared format for its most basic financial documents.

That matters to you as a buyer or renter because every month a project stalls in its planning phase is a month the finished building is not available. Delays in pre-development do not disappear. They get priced into what you eventually pay in rent, in purchase price, or in the cost of that latte at the new drive-through down the street.

No Shared Format

Usman Wajid, CEO and founder of Block and Mortar, a real estate development platform focused on the pre-construction phase, works with developers, general contractors, and financing partners to model costs and assess risk before a project breaks ground. What he sees, he says, is an industry where every firm uses its own spreadsheet layout for the same fundamental task.

The pro forma, the financial document that tells a developer whether a project pencils out, is the clearest example. A developer builds one version. Their banking partner uses a different template. Their equity investor uses yet another. The result is that teams spend hours transferring data from one spreadsheet into another. “Having to spend time doing admin work from taking data from one spreadsheet and putting it in another spreadsheet,” Wajid says. That is not analysis. It is data entry, repeated across every stakeholder on a deal.

Errors Compound at Scale

The problem compounds at scale. A national retail developer building dozens of locations a year might run through this reformatting exercise hundreds of times. Each cycle introduces the chance of transcription errors, version-control confusion, and misaligned assumptions that do not surface until later, when they are far more expensive to fix.

Wajid draws a comparison between healthcare and fintech, two industries that once operated with similar levels of fragmentation. Hospitals had no shared reporting standards; financial technology firms each spoke their own data language. Both sectors eventually adopted common frameworks, and both saw faster coordination afterward. Real estate development, he argues, has not made that leap.

Standardizing, Not Sharing

His point is not that firms need to open their books to competitors. “We don’t need to share all of our data, but we could standardize how we do our bids,” he says. The distinction matters. Standardization does not mean transparency between rivals. It means that when a developer sends a pro forma to a lender, the lender does not have to rebuild the document from scratch before evaluating it.

For home buyers and renters, the practical implication is this: the housing supply problem is not only about zoning fights and construction labor. It is also about an industry that loses weeks on administrative friction before a shovel ever touches dirt. In real estate development, Wajid says, “the biggest risk is time.” Every day spent reformatting spreadsheets is a day the project is not moving toward the permits, the financing close, or the groundbreaking that eventually produces the apartment you want to rent or the retail space your neighborhood needs.

Trust Is the Barrier

There is a meaningful counterpoint here. Standardization requires trust, and real estate developers guard their data fiercely, for good reason. Proprietary cost models, site-selection methods, and vendor relationships are competitive advantages. Asking firms to adopt shared formats means asking them to believe their edge will not leak. That cultural barrier is real, and no single platform can dissolve it overnight.

Still, the cost of the status quo lands somewhere. Wajid frames it in terms of failed projects that consume months of professional time before anyone realizes they will not work. “If you’re going to get to a no in six months, it’d be a lot better if you got there in a few days,” he says. A project that was never going to pencil out still consumed capital carrying costs and opportunity cost – resources that could have gone toward a project that does get built.

A Broader Industry Shift

Fragmentation of this kind rarely fixes itself. It usually takes a mix of pressure from lenders and investors who want consistent data, plus new tools that make standardized formats easier to adopt than proprietary ones. Several companies in the proptech space are now betting on that shift, each attacking a different piece of the pre-development process, from permitting to scheduling to capital markets.

Whether any of these efforts will actually take hold at scale remains unproven. Adoption depends on developers, lenders, and investors all agreeing to work from the same format, something that has not happened yet despite the clear cost of not doing so. What is clear is that closing this gap would touch a part of the building process most buyers and renters never see, yet feel the effects of every time a project takes longer than expected to break ground.

About the Expert: Usman Wajid is founder of Block and Mortar, a pre-development platform for commercial real estate that connects developers, general contractors, lenders, and investment partners during the earliest stages of a project. The platform launched in late 2024 with an initial focus on retail and multifamily development.

This article is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, financial, or investment advice. The views and opinions expressed herein reflect those of the individuals quoted and do not represent an endorsement of any company, product, or service mentioned. Readers should conduct their own due diligence and consult qualified professionals before making any investment decisions.