Here is how an 88 unit 55 plus building reached a 6.1 cap exit, and why internet nearly broke it.
Here is a case worth studying for anyone weighing age-restricted product. Take an 88 unit, built 2004, three-story elevator building in a suburban submarket of a mid-size sunbelt metro. Bought at $9.4M, 84 percent occupied, in-place rents about $1,290 average against comparable conventional units at $1,240. So a $50 premium on a building that was age-restricted. That premium is the whole opportunity, because it should have been much wider. The plan: $1.1M of capex over 18 months. About $340k of it goes to amenity work, converting a dead 2,100 square foot community room into a proper lounge with a demonstration kitchen, resurfacing a walking loop, and putting in a fenced dog run at $28k, which in a case like this tends to be the single best dollar-per-resident spend in the whole budget. Another $210k goes to unit interiors on turns only, 31 units. The rest is roof, two elevator modernizations, and parking. The part that nearly breaks it: internet. The building carries a bulk contract with a regional provider at speeds that were fine in 2016. About a third of the residents are still working, most of them from home at least part time, and the complaints are not polite. Four move-outs in one quarter in year one, three of them naming internet in the exit survey. Getting out of the bulk contract takes seven months and a $61k buyout that was never in the budget. Fiber to the unit runs another $195k against a $120k line, because the estimate was priced off a garden-style comp with no elevator shafts to work around. Where it lands. Exit occupancy 96 percent, average rent $1,585, so the premium to conventional widens to about $270. NOI goes from roughly $470k to $806k. Sale at 6.1 for $13.2M in month 24. After the capex and about $310k of transaction and carry costs the operator clears meaningfully more than the model projected, and an honest read is that a good chunk of that is cap rate compression on senior product that nobody earned. What to keep: the dog run, the walking loop, and turning interiors only on turnover instead of a mass renovation. Age-restricted residents in a 96 percent building do not move for a new backsplash, and a mass renovation is a $600k way to discover that. What to redo: price the internet situation before closing. Read the bulk services contract during diligence, never in month three.