Well, my question is how reliable the Nordic 44 numbers would be seeing as this is a custom "riff" on those numbers. I have no doubt from the description that it would be a tough boat, and it looks beautiful, but a PHRF of 84 with 28,000 lbs. on a 37' LWL? Maybe with an 80 foot mast...
I don't suggest for a moment that this is in any way a deal-breaker, but you'll want to extensively do a sail test (and place a deposit to show you're serious) in both light air and heavy air to see if she meets your idea of fast boat or not. I would suggest "stately", and owning a steel cutter in the same ballpark, I know about stately...
The boat might also have a tendency to "gripe" or be down by the stern due to all that (potential) overbuilding. My boat, for instance, carries 1,200 lbs in lead pigs forward, because she's not loaded with supplies in the extensive saloon lockers, and there's no workshop forward yet, no battery for the windlass, and no windlass, either. Throw in a 33 kg. Fortress and I can sell the pigs to a keel casting outfit. For the moment, though, she's half a hand's breadth high in the water and is pitching up by the bow a tad.
You might want to look at her against a sea wall from some distance to judge for yourself: is it cargo that needs shifting, was the line drawn wrong, or does the boat have a couple of inherent issues due to the builder departing from the game plan?
Good luck with this, though. It might not be the boat you think it is, but it could quite easily be even better. Frankly, unless it was a total pig under sail, it's a great deal of nice boat for the price.