MODEL / 03 · Illustrative engagement model

Stalled inventory recovery mandate

Completed or near-complete inventory that has been in the market for years, carrying finance cost and anchoring the project's perceived value downward. Every channel partner in the catchment has shown it, and buyers who visited previously remember the price. The launch playbook does not apply.

Asset class
Completed or near-complete residential
Mandate
Recovery mandate on legacy inventory
Typical scale
40–200 units of carried stock
Typical duration
12–24 months

This is an engagement model, not a client case study. It describes how this type of mandate is structured and what it is measured on. No client, project or outcome is represented.

The situation

What this kind of mandate starts from.

  • The remaining units are the ones nobody wanted at any point in the original ladder.
  • Carry cost — finance, maintenance, tax — accumulates monthly and is frequently not being counted against the defended price.
  • Channel partner goodwill has often been spent on earlier relaunches, so the network is reluctant to re-engage.
  • Ready possession is treated as a weakness in the marketing when it is in fact the strongest available argument for a specific buyer.
  • The original price ladder is still being defended long after it has ceased to be relevant.

The approach

How it is run.

  1. 01

    Re-underwrite every unit honestly

    What is actually wrong with each unit — permanent defect, fixable defect, or simply mispriced — because uniform discounting over-discounts the third category and under-addresses the first.

  2. 02

    Reposition rather than discount

    Change who the inventory is sold to. Ready possession is a decisive advantage for a buyer paying rent, needing to move, or unwilling to take construction risk after a bad experience elsewhere.

  3. 03

    Set a carry-cost-informed floor

    Model the finance, maintenance and tax cost of continued holding against the realisation loss from a correction now, and set a floor from that comparison rather than from the original ladder.

  4. 04

    Bundle selectively, never uniformly

    Costed concessions deployed on the units that need them, reported as realisation impact — so the hard stock clears without resetting the reference price for the whole project.

Measurement

What the mandate is measured on.

The metrics and cadence — not claimed results.

Units cleared per month

Reported monthly

Against the recovery plan, by defect category.

Net realisation vs carry-adjusted floor

Reported monthly

The comparison that matters: achieved price against the cost of continuing to hold.

Carry cost released

Reported monthly

Finance, maintenance and tax no longer being incurred on cleared units.

Channel partner re-engagement

Reported monthly

Active partners transacting, which is the leading indicator of a genuine relaunch.

The defended price is usually more expensive than the correction. Developers rarely count the carry against the position they are protecting, and once that calculation is made explicit the decision changes.

The lesson this model is built on

The first decision

Let's start before the building.

Send us the site, the scheme or the stalled inventory. We will tell you what we think — including when the answer is not to proceed.