I’m underwriting a new-build townhome community in Waynesboro, VA (Rosser Avenue area) and would appreciate input from anyone active in the Waynesboro/Staunton/Shenandoah Valley rental market.
Specifically looking to understand:
Realistic market rents for newer 3-bedroom townhomes
Current concessions, if any
How quickly comparable units are leasing
Rent growth or softness you’re seeing recently
Any new supply coming online that could impact rents/absorption
I’m less interested in published rent data and more interested in what properties are actually achieving on the ground today.
If you’re a local owner, property manager, broker, or investor and have insight, I’d really appreciate your thoughts. Happy to connect privately as well.
Hey Nachum, I do not have the experience or comps for Rosser Ave handy, but it is an interesting submarket to model right now. Curious how you are weighting new supply absorption against concession trends in secondary VA markets. Good luck with the underwriting.
Nachum — I don’t have boots-on-the-ground leasing experience in Waynesboro, so I wouldn’t pretend these are achieved-rent comps, but I pulled a quick current snapshot because I think you’re asking exactly the right question.
The 3BR townhome asking rents I’m seeing around Waynesboro are generally clustering somewhere around the high $1,800s through low $2,200s, depending on size, age and product.
What would make me cautious about underwriting toward the top of that range is time on market.
There are newer 3BR units asking around $2,000–$2,200 that have not disappeared immediately. Some have been marketed for a month or longer.
That doesn’t tell us the eventual executed rent, but it does tell us something important:
asking rent is not absorption.
I’d probably build three rent assumptions rather than one:
Downside: ~$1,850
Base: ~$1,950–$2,000
Upside: ~$2,150–$2,200
Then I’d make the deal earn its way from one case to the next with actual signed leases.
The other thing I’d spend a lot of time on is supply.
There is active new townhome construction around Waynesboro right now, including communities like Creekwood Village and Summit Townes, and additional units are still moving through the development pipeline.
That matters more to me than whether somebody tells me rents grew 4% last year.
With new-build rental product, your real competition isn’t just existing landlords. It can be the builder down the street delivering another batch of nearly identical units.
And builders/institutional owners can create effective-rent softness without reducing the advertised rent at all:
$2,100 with a free month is not economically a $2,100 lease.
Neither is $2,100 with waived fees, discounted deposits or other move-in incentives.
So if I were underwriting this community, I’d want the property manager/broker to give me recent executed leases, not a rent survey:
What was advertised?
What was actually signed?
What concession was given?
How many days from listing to signed lease?
How many applications did the unit receive?
And what comparable new units are scheduled to deliver during my lease-up?
For a single rental, being off $100/month is annoying.
For an entire community, being off $100–$200 per door and assuming faster absorption than the market will give you can change the investment pretty dramatically.
I’d therefore be much more interested in the bottom ten recent leases than the top ten current listings.
Listings tell you what owners want.
Signed leases and absorption tell you what the market is willing to give them.