Work record / Capital / Silver Mountain Ranches / Questions answered
Silver Mountain Ranches: questions answered
What people ask me about Silver Mountain Ranches, and my answers. The project itself has its own page.
What happens when you check every claim a raise leans on at its source?
You check each one before any outside dollar moves, and on this deal all three failed. The sponsor wanted Common Ground as the incoming development partner on his raise. The land was genuine, owned outright, with certified wells and an appraisal. The paperwork argued with itself. His deck sold a subdivision while his model underwrote a resort. A fund he named could not be found. A lender's letter of intent had expired. And he offered to pay advisors in his own paper instead of cash. I tested the three claims the request depended on against their real sources, not against what the deck said. When they failed, walking away was an option. I countered, with staged cash, a minority stake that vests only on milestones, a separately licensed placement advisor, and kill criteria written in advance. Nothing has closed, and after watching how the diligence went, the sponsor invited us into every part of the project.
Which failed claim did the most to change the structure of the deal?
The comparison nobody had run told me the most. One raise, two stories: the deck sold a subdivision and the sponsor's own model underwrote a resort. After that the other claims failed at their sources. The fund the deck named showed up in no SEC Form D filing, no adviser disclosure record and nowhere at the state corporation commission, and the lender's letter had lapsed with nothing recorded against the land. The land was real and the paper was not, so the ask had to stay within what the land can support. We sized the senior ask against the appraisal, and we made the appraisal a condition too: who did it, when, and on what use assumption, so it did not rest on an assumption nobody had examined.
How did you present the findings so that the sponsor brought Common Ground into the rest of the project?
I made a counter and did not walk, and I drafted it so a workable relationship could survive. It carried information rights, consent rights, a limit on the developer fee, and Arizona law. One standard term I deliberately kept out was a liquidation preference. We held a minority position in a project the sponsor controls, and a preference on top would have made us look like we were adding more of the boilerplate that had already eroded confidence in his own paperwork. The findings concerned the paper, and I kept the land at the center of every conversation. His response was the ask itself. After seeing how the diligence went, he asked us into every part of the project.