Presales: tracking what the bank will count

Presales decide when a development starts. The lender sets a threshold, and construction waits until the contracts clear it.

The delay rarely comes from slow selling. It comes from contracts the developer counted and the lender did not.

Your number and the lender's number differ

A developer counts a contract when somebody signs it. Your lender counts it when it meets their own conditions, and those conditions run longer than most sales teams expect.

• The cooling off period, which has to expire before anything counts.
• The deposit, cleared and held where the facility requires.
• The purchaser, who may need to be unrelated to you and at arm's length.
• The price, which must sit above any minimum the facility names.
• Foreign purchaser limits, where the facility caps them as a share.

A contract failing any one of those still sits in your sales report. It simply does nothing for your drawdown.

Track the conditions, not the contract

A sales list with a status of exchanged tells you very little. The tracker needs a column per condition, so the gaps in each contract show.

The table holds the lot, the purchaser, the price, the deposit date, the cooling off expiry and a qualifying flag. Your weekly number then comes from the rows.

Chase the weak contracts first

A contract missing a deposit three weeks after exchange is the one that will fail. The sales team usually knows which ones feel soft, and nobody records it.

The sort should run on what is outstanding rather than on date. The oldest incomplete contracts deserve the attention, and they rarely get it.

Know the gap to the threshold every week

The number that matters is not how many you sold. It is how many more qualifying contracts you need before the facility releases funds.

That gap belongs on a screen somebody reads weekly. A developer who knows they need four more lots behaves differently from one who knows they are close.

Watch the ones that expire

Presale contracts carry sunset dates, and a market that slows turns those dates into risk. A purchaser who can walk away often will.

Every sunset date lives as a field, with the coming quarter read off it. Losing three contracts to dates nobody watched can push a start by months.

Reconcile with your lender monthly

A monthly reconciliation catches a disagreement while it is still small. Waiting until you ask for the drawdown turns it into a delay.

Send your qualifying list and ask them to confirm the count. Our guide to feasibility sensitivity covers what a delayed start does to the rest of the numbers.

Your agent's report is not your tracker

An agent reports sales, because sales are what earns their commission. Their number counts a contract the day somebody signs it.

Your tracker counts what the lender counts, and the two will differ every month. Running the agent's number as your own is how a start date slips.

Their report is an input, and your own conditions column is the answer. Then a strong sales month and a weak qualifying month are both visible.

The agent also needs to know which conditions they chase. A deposit and a cooling off expiry are usually theirs, and nobody chases what nobody owns.

What to change first

• The lender's qualifying conditions get written out, in their words
• A column per condition replaces the single status
• Sorting by what is outstanding puts the oldest incomplete contracts first
• The gap to the threshold gets published weekly, not the total sold
• Every sunset date lives as a field, with the coming quarter read off it
• The qualifying list reconciles with the lender each month