Real-Life Math
As a land developer, it is your job to find land, purchase it at a reasonable price and then develop something on it. Of course, in order to make money, a new development must appeal to others. Those others might be homeowners or business owners who will rent space from you or buy plots outright.
Yesterday, you signed a contract to purchase 150 acres of vacant land, which you are buying with the profits from your last development.
After carefully studying the area around the newly purchased parcel and checking into state regulations and zoning ordinances, you have decided to turn the 150 acres into a mixed-use development. That is, the development will contain a combination of residences, retail and commercial sites.
Most of the development will be shops and businesses. But you have saved 40 acres for single-unit brownstones with ample backyards.
Math that developers deal with generally doesn't rise above high school algebra, and certainly not above trig or calculus, says Daren Fluke. He is a development consultant. Most of the math deals with land areas. "Civil engineers do the hard math," he says, such as drainage calculations and impervious surface calculations.
You decide that lot sizes of the brownstones will be 40 feet wide by 120 feet deep. How many brownstones will you be able to develop in the 40 acres set aside? To do this problem, you will need to know that there are 43,560 square feet in an acre.