Lessons from a Decade of Land Development and Construction in Central Florida
· by Werner Macedo
I'm Werner Macedo, a land acquisition, development, and construction executive based in Central Florida. Over the past decade I founded and led WD Invest, where my team and I delivered and entitled more than 3,000 residential units and lots — 19 development projects totaling 3,410 units, plus 150,000 square feet of commercial space, across communities from Deltona and Leesburg to Belleview, Palm Bay, and Orlando.
I didn't come up through construction. I started my career in New York as an accountant, working in tax from 2007 to 2013 after earning my B.S. in Accounting from Baruch College. That foundation turned out to be the most useful training a developer can have, and the lessons below are the ones a decade of building in Central Florida has taught me.
The numbers have to work before the dirt does
Every project looks good in a rendering. The discipline is in the pro forma. My accounting background taught me to underwrite a deal the way an auditor reads a ledger: assume the optimistic case is wrong, price the risks you can see, and keep a margin for the ones you can't. Land is the easiest thing in this business to overpay for, because once you've bought it wrong, no amount of good execution downstream fully fixes it. The deals I'm proudest of are the ones where the underwriting was boring — conservative rents, honest carrying costs, real contingencies. Boring spreadsheets build exciting communities.
Entitlements are where the value is created
Most people picture development as construction. In my experience, the value is created much earlier — in the rezoning hearings, the traffic and environmental studies, the months of working with county staff and neighbors to turn raw land into an approved community. A large share of my portfolio work at WD Invest was exactly that: rezoning and studies that took entitled land from paper to possibility. It's slow, unglamorous work, and it rewards patience and preparation over everything else. When a project finally earns its approvals, construction is the reward, not the battle.
A budget is a promise
Across my career I've managed development budgets of $30–45 million and helped source capital stacks of more than $100 million. Money at that scale belongs to investors, lenders, and partners who trusted you with it, and a budget is how you keep that trust: realistic at the start, tracked relentlessly in the middle, and reported honestly at the end — especially when the news isn't what anyone wanted to hear. Financing, loans, and investor reporting aren't back-office chores. They're the business. A developer who treats them that way gets to keep developing.
Development is a team sport
No developer builds anything alone. Behind every approved plan set is a small army — civil engineers, surveyors, land-use attorneys, environmental consultants, lenders, builders, and county staff — and the developer's real job is to get all of them pulling in the same direction, on the same schedule. The projects that stall are rarely the ones with bad land; they're the ones where communication broke down between the people holding different pieces of it. I've learned to over-communicate, to put decisions in writing, and to treat every consultant and contractor like a long-term partner — because in a market this size, you will work with the same people again, and your reputation travels faster than you do.
Local knowledge compounds
Central Florida is not one market. A single-family community in Marion County, townhomes in Silver Spring Shores, and multifamily in Deltona are three different businesses that happen to share a map. What works is matching the product to the place — the schools, the roads, the employers, the way a specific town is actually growing — and that only comes from years of driving the land, sitting in the county meetings, and learning each submarket on its own terms. Every project taught me something the next one used. That's the real portfolio: not the units, the judgment.
Central Florida keeps growing because people keep choosing to build their lives here. I'm proud to have played a part in building the places they land, and I'm just getting started.
— Werner Macedo
Land Acquisition, Development & Construction · Central Florida