There is a familiar moment at the start of a deal when you have a program and a few comps, but no drawings. You still need a budget that can hold up in a quick IC discussion. Building that from scratch means pulling unit costs, sizing quantities, layering on loads, and sanity checking the totals. This is where small errors slip in. A missed load, a loose contingency, or a casual take on escalation can move the answer enough to misread the deal. This task cuts that friction and gives you a model you can defend. Development ~10 min to run Estimate Development Costs Vic prompt Use Vic to estimate development costs for a 180,000 SF medical office building with underground parking. Purpose Produces a benchmarked budget ready for go/no-go decisions. Replaces 90 minutes of manual work with a 10-minute model. Inputs Property Type Optional Development Program Optional Cost Data Optional Construction Timeline Optional Market Optional Outputs An Excel model with hard costs by trade, all loads and contingencies, the all-in total, and reconciled $/GSF, $/NSF, and $/unit metrics, plus a short summary. Time saved Replaces roughly 90 minutes of manual work with about 10 minutes. How it works You give Vic a simple description of the project and any context you have. Property type and a development program are enough to start. If you have market, timeline, or cost data, include it. Vic turns that into a quantified program and a line by line hard cost budget tied to benchmarks. Run it with a single command: Use Vic to estimate development costs for a 180,000 SF medical office building with underground parking. Under the hood, the task builds hard costs by trade using unit cost times quantity. It then adds general conditions, contractor fee, insurance, and bond. Soft costs and contingencies are sized to the stage of design, so you are not implying precision you do not have. The model escalates costs to the construction midpoint based on your timeline, then normalizes the result to $/GSF, $/NSF, and $/unit so you can compare against market benchmarks. The output is an Excel model you can open and use. It includes the full hard cost breakdown, all loads and contingencies, and the all in total. The normalized metrics tie to the totals, so quick checks line up. You also get a short written summary that calls out the main drivers. This is for early stage budgeting, not a GMP. The value is speed with structure. You move from a rough program to a defensible number, and the assumptions stay visible so you can adjust them as the design evolves. Two details matter in practice. First, the loads are explicit. General conditions, fee, insurance, and bond are not buried in a single factor. That makes it easier to tune the model to your contractor and delivery method. Second, the normalization step forces a reality check. If your $/GSF or $/unit is out of line for the market and product type, you see it right away and can trace it back to the driver. Teams often spend about an hour and a half to assemble a first pass like this, especially when they stitch together prior budgets. This task produces a clean model in about ten minutes. The bigger gain is consistency. When every deal starts from the same structure, comparisons are cleaner and decisions move faster. Use it at go or no go, before you engage a GC, and any time the program shifts. It will not replace a detailed estimate later, and it should not. It gives you a disciplined starting point that holds up in a quick review and is easy to update as you learn more.