Built a 56 Unit Passive House Apartment Complex in Georgia. AMA!

Built a 56 Unit Passive House Apartment Complex in Georgia. AMA!

Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes

Hey guys my name is George and about a year ago I posted on BP in regards to a 36 unit development that we finished in Moultrie GA. We built it for around 1.5 million, post construction Refi appraisal came out to 2 million(~500k net) and today it has sold for 2.7 million(another ~700k net). Since the post over a year ago there's lots that I have learned. In the last couple years we've only done one complex per year. Typically around the 36 to 48 unit size. But this year we are 90% completed on a largest to date: 56 unit development in Bainbridge Georgia. It's been a really busy year and I haven't really had time to post any thing else on BP because as soon as we finished site work on our 56 units.. we purchased 4 other lots to build on in Dublin(80 units), Americus(80units) and Cairo Georgia(48units). We spent the last year applying for rezoning, variances, city/community meetings, back and forth with engineering etc and finally today everything is ready to build. 

The 56 unit apartment complex that we built this year we used passive House design where we used to buy six on the exterior walls with 6 inches of open cell spray foam insulation. As well as 14 inches in the roof to create an airtight thermal envelope. This theoretically this will help us reduce our HVAC needs by up to 70%. This is important because we include all utilities in our base rents. All electricity, water, gas, trash/sewer and high speed internet is included. The more we save the more we earn. We want to take the responsibility out of the residents hands to get all of this done since we think economies of scale wise it should be a top down effort. At the end of the day hopefully to put some more time and $$ back into the hands of our residents so they can spend it on their families, careers and giving back to the communities around them. 

There is so much I learned about developing. I mean the actual building part is what most think about but thats just one task in a sea of tasks and probably the most straight forward.. Other things from how to have banking relationships, what they ask and look for, what kind of draw headache do they have. How to properly present to a city/community meeting. What areas to purchase in and others to avoid. How much can we afford to pay for the land? Wow all four lots we bought are in federal opportunity zones.. What are those and how to take max advantage of that? 18 or 24 months construction loan? As projects get larger we need more cash. Mezzanine debt model or equity model? What rates to borrow the money at? We want to keep these for cashflow but damn we can sell at such a profit! What do we do now? We want 10,000 units but how can we get there if we have to keep selling existing to build more? Its just a hamster wheel... Prices of lumber are skyrocketing should be buy now and tie up cash for our upcoming devs, ocean freight pricing tripled should we continue ordering from overseas vendors? Our GC is stretched too thin and cant do all of our projects we have to find another shop but everyones so busy! List goes on....

For myself I am nostalgic sometimes and like to look back at photos and videos of my own journey. Sometimes I forget what things that have been done because i'm constantly looking at the future so this way I can look back and see the ideas that i had during that period of my life(right or wrong) and see how far I have come. I also have had lot of interest in the process for developments from my own circle of friends as well as people that have found us online. When I was getting started, there wasn't anyone that I could find online that could really answer my questions or had some videos about it. So i'll be documenting our journey here for anyone that comes after us there will be some bread crumbs. My first mentor said that success leaves clues if you look closely enough. Hopefully a good google or youtube search is all thats needed. Affordability is going to be a huge topic soon so the world needs a much help as it can get since Elon Musk isn't solving that one for us we have to do it ourselves... dang it!

I'll try and update more on BP blog style on the progress and answer any questions that can help anyone who's curious!

ok its 12:33am now and so time to wrap this up...

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Paul HanPro Member
Member since 2021 · 14 posts · 19 votes
5y

Crazy, I was looking for multifamily's and I saw your post for the sale of the cairo units.  I'm thinking, who the heck is this guy, so I clicked on your profile and I see that you posted this post literally 10 minutes ago LOL.  

-Considering you look pretty young, can I ask how you got started in the development game?

-how did you get the funds to begin such a large project? 

-In your opinion is it worth your time to do these developments? any regrets?

-why not keep them for cash flow?

See this reply in the discussion

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  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    @Jeffrey Donis Thank you

  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    @Steve Potash Great question. It’s actually the management company that we own so we pay ourselves basically but we need to show it on the pro forma for investors and banks. It’s just one full-time lady. She’s awesome! We rely on technology quite a bit for the property management process so I would say there’s a few hundred more units more that she could handle before we would think about hiring someone else. 

  • Investor · Frostburg, MD · Member since 2015 · 46 posts · 26 votes
    5y

    With property management, we have the same sort of issue.  We implemented all the technology, so now we only need someone part time, but it's hard to find someone part time to do property management. We really only need someone to do 20 hours per week on property management and 20 hours per week on maintenance, but it's really hard to find one person qualified to do both. How do you handle maintenance.  Do you have a full time person, because with the number of units, it sometimes cuts into your profitability too much and newer units don't require as much maintenance.  Thanks

  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    @Steve Potash Yea your in that in between space. you have options. You can pay a little bit extra for a outside property manager to manage you until you get large enough to bring someone in the house full-time. Or you self manage with partners or yourself and utilize part-time helpers and technology with the intent to grow big enough to eventually hire someone full-time. That seems like you're bottleneck right now and that's fine there's bottlenecks all along the way. once you solve this there will be something else. Me personally I would try to find a virtual assistant to handle all of the online application processes through buildium or apartments.com. I've used both and apartment.com is simple and easy but buildium is probably where you want to be since you're doing multiple units. good luck 

  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    oh yea we have a couple full time guys and they handle al units for us. since now we have over 200 units we can afford to do so. but when we were first starting it was just calling guys and yes overpaying a little since they werent full time. its ok thats jus the price to pay for growing..

  • Investor · Durham, NC · Member since 2020 · 1k+ posts · 691 votes
    5y

    @George Y. I appreciate you starting this conversation. Georgia is a great market! We're here in NC, so we're well aware of how hot the Sunbelt states are right now. I look forward to following your journey! Keep up the great work!

  • Investor · Indianapolis, IN · Member since 2018 · 1k+ posts · 756 votes
    5y
    Originally posted by @George Y.:

    Hey guys my name is George and about a year ago I posted on BP in regards to a 36 unit development that we finished in Moultrie GA. We built it for around 1.5 million, post construction Refi appraisal came out to 2 million(~500k net) and today it has sold for 2.7 million(another ~700k net). Since the post over a year ago there's lots that I have learned. In the last couple years we've only done one complex per year. Typically around the 36 to 48 unit size. But this year we are 90% completed on a largest to date: 56 unit development in Bainbridge Georgia. It's been a really busy year and I haven't really had time to post any thing else on BP because as soon as we finished site work on our 56 units.. we purchased 4 other lots to build on in Dublin(80 units), Americus(80units) and Cairo Georgia(48units). We spent the last year applying for rezoning, variances, city/community meetings, back and forth with engineering etc and finally today everything is ready to build. 

    The 56 unit apartment complex that we built this year we used passive House design where we used to buy six on the exterior walls with 6 inches of open cell spray foam insulation. As well as 14 inches in the roof to create an airtight thermal envelope. This theoretically this will help us reduce our HVAC needs by up to 70%. This is important because we include all utilities in our base rents. All electricity, water, gas, trash/sewer and high speed internet is included. The more we save the more we earn. We want to take the responsibility out of the residents hands to get all of this done since we think economies of scale wise it should be a top down effort. At the end of the day hopefully to put some more time and $$ back into the hands of our residents so they can spend it on their families, careers and giving back to the communities around them. 

    There is so much I learned about developing. I mean the actual building part is what most think about but thats just one task in a sea of tasks and probably the most straight forward.. Other things from how to have banking relationships, what they ask and look for, what kind of draw headache do they have. How to properly present to a city/community meeting. What areas to purchase in and others to avoid. How much can we afford to pay for the land? Wow all four lots we bought are in federal opportunity zones.. What are those and how to take max advantage of that? 18 or 24 months construction loan? As projects get larger we need more cash. Mezzanine debt model or equity model? What rates to borrow the money at? We want to keep these for cashflow but damn we can sell at such a profit! What do we do now? We want 10,000 units but how can we get there if we have to keep selling existing to build more? Its just a hamster wheel... Prices of lumber are skyrocketing should be buy now and tie up cash for our upcoming devs, ocean freight pricing tripled should we continue ordering from overseas vendors? Our GC is stretched too thin and cant do all of our projects we have to find another shop but everyones so busy! List goes on....

    For myself I am nostalgic sometimes and like to look back at photos and videos of my own journey. Sometimes I forget what things that have been done because i'm constantly looking at the future so this way I can look back and see the ideas that i had during that period of my life(right or wrong) and see how far I have come. I also have had lot of interest in the process for developments from my own circle of friends as well as people that have found us online. When I was getting started, there wasn't anyone that I could find online that could really answer my questions or had some videos about it. So i'll be documenting our journey here for anyone that comes after us there will be some bread crumbs. My first mentor said that success leaves clues if you look closely enough. Hopefully a good google or youtube search is all thats needed. Affordability is going to be a huge topic soon so the world needs a much help as it can get since Elon Musk isn't solving that one for us we have to do it ourselves... dang it!

    I'll try and update more on BP blog style on the progress and answer any questions that can help anyone who's curious!

    ok its 12:33am now and so time to wrap this up...

     I really enjoyed reading this! Thanks for sharing! I have a huge interest in development and hope to do that in the future one day. 

  • Investor · Indianapolis, IN · Member since 2018 · 1k+ posts · 756 votes
    5y
    Originally posted by @George Y.:

    @Harish Nandipati The first couple we did were an experiment and we took the data from the first once we built five years ago and built up on that. But energy efficiency starts with the design phase so try working with an architect or a energy model or to make sure that you guys are thinking the entire thing through. We decided to try to implement some of the passive house methods to help us. Basically just double what your code locally requires. We cover all the utilities currently we haven’t had a situation where we have thought we need to put a cap on electricity usage. Everything we have and there’s energy-efficient and we don’t really make it the tenants responsibility to be more efficient. At least not yet

     I am going back and reading a lot of your responses. Thanks for delivering a ton of value!!

  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    @Jeffrey Donis thanks fir the support man!

  • Financial Advisor · USA · Member since 2017 · 151 posts · 379 votes
    5y

    @Justin G. Thank you. I’m glad you got some value out of it. More updates soon I’m still learning as well so we can all learn together

  • Member since 2021 · 5 posts · 2 votes
    5y

    Thank you for the great info.

    Where is one of the apartment complexes in GA?  I would love to take a look at what you have done. I live in Peachtree City, South of Atlanta.
    We are looking at land North of Panhandle (FL) where people are migrating for affordable housing since most of the year rounders are getting squeezed out and moving over the bridge to live. Naval bases there too with lots of rental needs. 

    There are a few areas closer to me that could benefit from this type of rental complex but I don’t think we could find 10,000/acre - that sounds like you’d have to be close to nothing to get that kind of deal. Anything close to a box store is going for at least 50/acre. 

  • Real Estate Agent · Greenville, SC · Member since 2016 · 24 posts · 14 votes
    5y
    Originally posted by @George Y.:

    @Account Closed yeah I guess I'm just from a small town in Georgia. I don't understand California prices. My cousin lives in the Bay Area and his house is over $1.6 million for what I would consider a piece of crap. I told him to sell that thing and invested into my apartments in Georgia. Then in five years he could buy three of those in California if he wanted to.... he has yet to do so

    George-I live in Greenville, SC-not far at all from you and I’d be more than happy to invest with you all and triple my money in 5 years!!  Would love to chat! 

  • Financial Advisor · Philadelphia, PA · Member since 2019 · 38 posts · 14 votes
    5y

    @George Yu Congratulations George! If you need any help underwriting, raise equity, or debt. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me. My firm is called Rothrock Real Estate Group!

  • Investor · Toronto, ON · Member since 2017 · 8 posts · 1 vote
    4y



    Hi @George Yu, I would be interested to invest in your projects. What is your financial structure? Loans, equity, mezzanine. Can we connect to discuss? 

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