Multifamily Renovations – Good, Fast, Cheap

So there’s an adage in construction that you’ve got good, fast, cheap. You get to pick two. And I’ve seen this to be true over the course of many, many years of doing a lot of construction projects. And when you’re choosing a general contractor sometimes you’ve gotta make that sacrifice. If you want it good and fast, it ain’t gonna be cheap. Or if you want it cheap and fast, probably not gonna be good. And you can make any combination of those and you’re likely to be in the ballpark of kind of the realm of reality. I want to make this video, we’re working on a project. We’re about three weeks out from closing a 130 unit apartment complex that’s got a pretty heavy lift on the renovation. So we’re in the kind of final process selecting a vendor for that. And you know, the challenge is, you could probably find a vendor that could do it cheaper, but are they gonna take longer? Are we gonna sacrifice speed for price? Or is it better to go with a higher price vendor that can have more speed because in the multi family world we’re gonna start from the outside in on the property, rebrand, paint, address some obvious deferred maintenance that’s hurting the aesthetic of the property, and so all those things. We need to go and od that as fast as possible so that every new resident walking in the door has that new kind of wow experience. And we can’t afford to wait six months to have that happen. We need to have that happen immediately. Same thing on the inside. We’ve got a number of units to get in and do some renovations on. We need those to happen fast as well. So sometimes, and this of course case by case but sometimes you might be willing to sacrifice and get a little bit higher price vendor that’s got the breath and the scale to get through the project more quickly. Because as we’re talking about leases, and revenue dollars coming in, you know two three months of lost revenue opportunity on new leases it adds up to a lot of money. So sometimes it’s okay to sacrifice a little bit of the price or pay a little bit higher price in order to get a vendor that’s gonna be able to hammer through the project. Or at least get those big milestones met quickly because you want to change the outside appearance of that apartment community as quickly as possible in order to project to the community and to perspective residents that hey, we’ve got a new sheriff in town, this is a new experience, new ownership group is putting some fresh capital into this project, and so on and so forth. So it’s important to make that impression quickly as you begin to reposition your property. Of course every projects different. But as part of documenting our journey and kind of acquiring and repositioning these apartment communities, I just wanted to talk a little bit about that kind of vendor selection process and how you’ve gotta balance speed, and budget. And of course at the end of the day these are syndication’s so the entire goal in mind here is to beat your projections that you set out for investors. And that makes it a very sustainable business model that you can repeat over and over and have your investors come participate in again because you took care of them on the last project. So more to come on this project. I’m excited to share more details after we get to the closing table. And start to share some before and afters on the renovation. Thanks.