When assessing an investment opportunity, you should discount the cashflow according to your opportunity cost for your equity capital. Otherwise you are in danger of thinking a deal is good, when in reality it's terrible.
I assume a long term nominal return of about 8% on my portfolio, so any money from the 'stash needs to repaid at 8% just to keep even. Any leverage via mortgages would be a lower cost of capital, say 5%. Thus on average with a 30% equity ratio, I have a weighted average cost of capital of 6%.
Any real estate project needs to return this just to pay its way, and only extra cashflow above that counts as a real investment return. So when I look at the cashflow, I need to use a discount rate and include the capital investment upfront.