Four one-beds or two-and-two: which mix would you rather own at this size?

The number you're missing is days on market by unit type, and it swings harder than the rent does. In the markets my team covers, one-beds lease faster in the spring and then sit in November. Two-beds lease slower all year and steadier. If your one-bed turns in October you can be looking at forty vacant days, which wipes out most of what you saved on the cheaper turn.

Also the interchangeable-parts thing is worth more than people think. We stock one style of blind and one faucet across a building and the maintenance calls get cheaper because nobody's guessing.

Run it out. Ten years, building A at 8.5 turns a door across four doors is roughly 34 turns, 1,400 each, about 47,600, plus vacancy days. Building B at maybe 5 turns on the two-beds and 8.5 on the one-beds is around 27 turns, blended maybe 2,000, so 54,000. B costs more to turn and grosses 6,600 more a year. B wins by a mile on those inputs and it isn't close.

Which means your real question is whether the 14-month one-bed tenancy is a market fact or a guess from listing history. That single input decides the whole thing, and listing history won't tell you it, prior owner's rent roll will. Ask for three years of it.

@sextant that's the clearest version of it I've seen. I'd add that the rent roll also tells you whether the seller has been renewing at market or just keeping people. Long tenancies are lovely right up until you find out the two-bed is 240 under.

Long holds change the answer. Over twenty years the mix that ages best is the one you can still rent when the neighborhood shifts, and two-beds have more people who might want them. All one-beds is a bet on a single kind of household staying put.

Nobody's mentioned parking. Four one-beds is four cars if you're lucky. Two two-beds can be four cars on their own. If the lot holds five spaces the mixed building has a fight in it every winter.

@arbor that's the kind of thing that never shows up in a spreadsheet and generates half the complaints. I'd walk the lot on a Tuesday night before I voted.

@juniper, does either building let you convert? A big one-bed with a den sometimes becomes a legal two-bed and sometimes doesn't, and it turns on egress and bedroom window rules that are local, so you'd need the building department's answer rather than a contractor's. If A has that in it the gross gap closes.