Case study · Fourplex

Dogfooding on a Utah County fourplex.

I’m building a four unit infill project in Utah County. I use it as a live test bed for the same tooling I sell to clients. Everything below is in production on a real deal with a real lender and a real timeline.

The pipeline, before

Like most small developers, I started with spreadsheets. A proforma workbook, a lender comparison tab, a lot tracker, an entitlement checklist, a draw schedule. Seven tabs, then ten, then fourteen. Every time I wanted to compare two scenarios I copied the whole workbook.

Specific pain:

• Lender comparison took about six hours per round because figures lived in three places and the lender facing PDF was a hand assembled Word doc.
• Lot screening was a weekend ritual. Click around county GIS, guess at utility access, eyeball slope on a map, give up on half the parcels.
• Action tracking lived in my head and in unread text messages from my civil engineer.

What I built

A single screen hub. Vite, React, and Tailwind, running locally and deployed private to me. Five modules:

• Proforma. Editable assumptions, scenario fork in one click, sensitivity table that actually updates.
• Lender comparison. Ranks every lender I’ve quoted on rate, LTC, recourse, prepayment, close speed. Regenerates the lender facing PDF from current proforma values on one click.
• Lot qualifier. Takes a parcel ID, pulls zoning, setbacks, utility proximity, and slope. Scores against my build program. Flags dealbreakers.
• Entitlement timeline. What’s blocking the project, who owes the next action, when it’s due. Texts me when something goes stale.
• Action log. Every decision, with a date and a reason. This is the one that has saved the most grief when a lender or partner asks “why did you assume X.”

What it changed

• Lender comparison went from about six hours per round to about 20 minutes.
• Lot screening went from a weekend ritual to a triage that fits in a coffee.
• I stopped losing decisions. This sounds soft. It is the single biggest change.

Why this matters for your pipeline

The fourplex isn’t the product. The product is the pattern: small, composable tools sitting on top of the spreadsheets and emails you already have, doing the boring assembly work that eats your evenings. Your pipeline will not look like mine. The shape of the fix usually does.