Development finance has its own vocabulary, and lenders assume you speak it. You don't need to use the acronyms to get a deal funded, but you do need to know what they mean — because every one of them is a lever the lender pulls when they size your facility.
The cost side
TDC — total development cost. Land, plus hard costs (the build), plus soft costs (professional fees, council contributions, holding costs), plus contingency, plus sales costs, plus finance costs. It is the whole number. When a lender talks about lending to a percentage of cost, this is the cost they mean.
Hard costs and soft costs. Hard costs are the physical build — the builder's contract. Soft costs are everything around it: architect, town planner, quantity surveyor, engineering, council, legals. New developers routinely under-cook soft costs by 30%. Credit teams know the real number for your project type and will quietly re-cast your feasibility if yours looks light.
Contingency. The buffer for the things you can't see yet. Lenders expect to see it as a real line — usually a percentage of hard costs — not a rounding fudge.
The value side
GRV / GDV — gross realisable (or development) value. What the finished project sells for, in total. Often quoted both including and excluding GST, which matters enormously — a lender lending against value ex-GST is lending against a smaller number than the headline.
How the lender sizes the loan
LVR — loan-to-value ratio. The loan as a percentage of the as-is value of the land or asset.
LTC — loan-to-cost. The loan as a percentage of total development cost. This is usually the binding constraint on a construction facility.
LTGRV — loan-to-gross-realisable-value. The loan as a percentage of the end value. A lender will hold you under all three at once; whichever bites first sets your loan.
ICR — interest cover ratio. How comfortably the project services its interest, usually from presales or end-value coverage. The leverage you'd like and the leverage the ICR allows are often two different numbers.
The thing that unlocks the facility
Presales. Pre-contracted sales of completed lots, often required before a lender will fund a cent. The presale hurdle — say "100% of debt covered by qualifying presales" — is one of the first things to establish, because it changes your whole timeline. A lender who'll fund with fewer presales is worth real money; finding that lender is the job.
None of this is complicated once you've seen it twice. The reason it matters is that a credit committee runs your deal through every one of these in the first ten minutes. If your feasibility already answers them, you're funded faster and cheaper.