Scaling Into Multi-Family: What’s the Hidden Cost Nobody Talks About?

[Daniel Sehy]

I’ve been in construction and operations long enough to know that scaling single-family and scaling multi-family are two very different games. I’ve managed projects with hundreds of moving parts, budgets in the tens of millions, and teams that lived or died by system discipline. That experience has taught me a hard truth: the bigger the deal, the less forgiving the mistakes.

What I’ve seen in multi-family is that the obvious challenges (financing hurdles, cap rates, and NOI pressure) aren't always the ones that sink you. It's the hidden costs, the turnover velocity nobody forecasted, the deferred maintenance underestimated in year one, or the management team that wasn't quite ready for scale. Those cracks, left unchecked, eat returns faster than any headline number.

I'm curious how others here have experienced this. We can all read textbooks about DSCR and vacancy assumptions but what really moves the needle is lived experience from operators in the trenches.

Questions:

• In your scaling journey, what was the “hidden cost” that blindsided you most?

• How do you build systems to prevent those costs from becoming repeat problems?

• When you look back, was the hardest part the numbers on the spreadsheet or managing the people who make those numbers real?