I Built a Quad. Here Are My Real Costs. (Real Estate Development and Build to Rent Training)

all right what's up guys Daniel Clayman here I've been working on this video for a while actually I just finished a brand new Quad you can see here in the pictures and I'm going to show you a lot more pictures here it's a 4unit apartment building we just wrapped it up it's fully leased cash flowing and in this video I'm going to walk you through a whole bunch of things including my exact costs that it took to build this thing so it's on a very skinny lot it's in Richmond Virginia and it was kind of a challenging design and I'll walk you through some of some of the design features of of this quad but it sits on a 30t wide lot and the project turned out awesome really pretty big balconies outdoor spaces big spacious layouts lots of natural light this is these are the final professional photos that we had our our regular photographer take again lots of natural light inside big Living Spaces really nice kitchens with full height pantry cabinets backsplashes quartz countertops the these leased up for the most part pretty fast it was a little bit of a slow summer but uh all four units are now leased up so and again these are some of the final pictures this is the balcony the the balconies are 8 by 18 ft and then we added some really cool features like these mud mud rooms which look great but really didn't cost us much to build at all big uh big bathrooms 48 in vanities with quartz countertops in the bathrooms just overall a really nice design so in this video I'm going to show you exactly what this project cost to build I'm going to show you the floor plans I'll show you my exact floor plans in this video and you're you're welcome to replicate them if you want uh again very cool design for these apartments I'm going to break down the order of events and construction and show you actual pictures throughout the construction I'm going to show you where I went over budget I'm very open with my numbers and and this is a big one I'm going to show you where the you having to go by commercial building code in this project drove up cost by over $30 a square foot now again this this was still a profitable project but building by Commercial Code when we went to a quad drove up costs by over 30 bucks a foot and I will show you the exact break down of how that $30 a foot is what what it's composed of okay and finally I'm going to give you my take on whether you should build quads or not and how to avoid cost over runs if you do build something like this okay so make sure you watch this whole video the there there's no fluff here we don't you know we we I there's no Lamborghinis in my video or all this other that that you find in in most YouTube videos if you follow our YouTube channel you know it's it's very deep hard-hitting content that you can Implement and like real information that you can use so really quick my name is Daniel Clayman uh that's that's that's my that's my wife Dina I'm actually recording this on our eighth uh wedding anniversary it's today so we've got we've got three beautiful children together so I built real estate I built software for Real Estate Investors I I started back in ' 08 with with zero money I'm a first generation immigrant uh I got laid off in '08 had absolutely nothing and and I got into real estate I started renovating one house at a time doing gut Renovations of historic properties doing uh some flips bird deals and and I I slowly evolved into doing real estate development today I own and manage a pretty large multif family and mixed use portfolio it currently it's it's north of $60 million and and with the projects have in the pipeline it'll soon be over $100 million in projects that that we own and manage without um almost almost without outside investors so my in my business right now I buil everything from single family homes and duplexes that look like this to to small mixed use developments this is a bunch of duplexes that we recently finished quads small mixed use buildings mediumsized mixed use buildings all the way to to larger multif family and mixed use projects so I I like to think that in my business I have a a fairly unique View and insights into specific costs when it comes to both small and large projects I think we're fairly unique in the sense that we build both small and large projects and so there are ongoing conversations inside my company that that we have about is it better to build small because we actually buil if we build stuff by Residential Building Code it costs way less per foot to build or is it better to build big because there's some economies of scale there and we can create more units most of what I do is build to rent but but cost per foot goes up so uh I'll touch on some of these topics in this video and I think it's going to be really insightful and if you're looking to get into development or if you're already developing this should be very interesting for you to be able to Compare costs in your Market to to my costs so a few months ago I put out this video very similar to what I'm recording for you now called I it's about the four duplexes that I built and they break down my exact costs for those duplexes and because they were duplexes I was able to build them by residential building codes so we were able to avoid a lot lot of things that commercial building code triggers and so after you watch this video go back and if you haven't seen the duplexes video go back and watch that video so you can see the difference in my market for me in my business in cost between building by residential and commercial building code and they are significant so let me give you a quick backstory on this project and I'm going to show you floor plans and I'm going to show you all my numbers so I was already starting on this how many units was it it was we just finished this project also it's a 16 unit mixed use building and we had already broken ground on it and I literally came across the slot across the street it came to me off Market I had the opportunity to buy it for a very fair price and because it was a byright development we were able to very quickly design the project apply for permits and break ground and literally catch the 4unit project up along to the 16 unit so you can see here we were framing up the 16 unit and had already started clearing and doing site work on the 4 unit across the street right so here's some more pictures during the project the right here is the 16 unit project that's framed up and we are starting to frame across the street and literally I I I treat the whole thing like a 20 unit project even though it's the two buildings are across the street from one another because we were able to manage them side by side right there there's some major economies of scale to being able to do both of these projects at the same time from a construction management standpoint certain sourcing of materials etc etc so this is the survey this is the original survey for the piece of land for the four unit it's it's a piece of land that's 3 foot wide 155 ft deep 4650 ft so given the current zoning in enrichment it's it's r63 zoning r63 zoning allows a couple of different things I could have built a detach duplex you need a minimum of 3,200 ft so this lot meets the lot requirement for just a duplex or you can build multif family and you need 1,000 squ ft of of land per buildable unit so that means here I could go up to four units and so when I acquired this piece of land I had a choice I could have built just a duplex with some some pretty large units or I could have done a 4unit building so I chose to do a 4unit building here because in If You're Building multif Family you need a 5 foot side yard setback this meant that the actual quad could be 20 ft wide and the beauty of doing infill development like this on these skinny narrow Lots you know you can use this to your advantage so I I I've got a great architect on this project but I very quickly from the beginning kind of knew what I wanted to do here I wanted to design a building where all of my living spaces and kitchens were in the front so that they could get natural light from the front but also from both sides of the building I wanted to create Living Spaces that were flooded with natural light from as many directions as possible again these little infill narrow Lots can be challenging but they also create opportunities to design your buildings the right way so that you create amazing living spaces so I basically got with my architect and I said let's design a traditional picture like a Boston Triple Decker one unit stacked on top of another unit stacked on top of another unit living spaces in the front kitchens and then bedrooms towards the back but because I can build four units here and not three I said hey let's put a stair tower on the rear of the building because what you don't want and let me see if I if if I can do like a little laser pointer here one thing you can do is you can you can build you know you need ability for your tenants or your buyers whatever to get to the second and third floor so one thing you can do is put a stairwell cut a stair Tower here in the front but you're you're eating into valuable living space and daylight and natural light in the front of the building so instead I said hey let's leave all of this as living space let's put a stair Tower in the rear to access all of the apartments this is our main entry but because I can build four units here instead of three let's add a three-story town home to the rear of the building let's stack it on the back very simple design but what this allows me to do is retain all my space in the front for living space to be flooded with natural light the only entry into all of the apartments is here and this is the only common space there's no hallways this stair Tower is the only common space for this building so this is what the site plan looked like this is the actual s line we submitted to the city so here's here's the Triple Decker in the front with big balconies stair Tower and then the three-story Town Home and these guys have their own stair Tower to get from the first to the second to the third floor this is the side profile of the building and our architectural plans again balconies in the front lots of natural light big windows and and then this is the only entry into the building right here and so this is the floor plan so you can see here right eight 8 by8 balconies big big outdoor spaces double sets of French doors in the front to allow lots of natural light and indoor outdoor flow and actually I changed these for from French doors and I'll explain to you why later lots of Windows here lots of natural light in the front kitchens and then two bedroom and bath Suites here with closet and then stair Tower and then in the rear is the three-story town home so this is the first floor plan the town home on the first floor has a kitchen and living space and doors out to their own little patio and then on the second floor the town home has a bedroom and a full bath Suite with a walk-in closet and same thing on the third floor very fairly simple floor plans but very very livable these are Big apart Ms they're spacious they're comfortable every bathroom all of our bathrooms have their own linen closets lots of storage big kitchens so you can see here right the the natural let me turn my laser pointer off here the natur lots of natural light in the Living Spaces the entire living room is flooded from three directions with natural light and then big kitchens 8T islands in the kitchens full full height Pantry cabinets which were not cheap I'll go into those costs here in detail here's another view if you're staying in the kitchen right so you can see the entire front of the building is basically glass and and and to me that's incredibly important because natural light is really important for the quality of life but it's also important not to just get natural light from One Direction you want to get natural light into your units from as many directions as possible and that's what we were able to to achieve her so so let me let me do a quick side note right uh you're you're watching this you're show you're seeing my floor plans I get emails all the time from people watching my videos saying hey can I can I buy your plans people email me from all over the country or they comment in in our YouTube videos and and and the answer is no you're welcome to I'm showing you my floor plants you're welcome to replicate my floor plant in the building that you're doing but I'm not going to email you I'm not going to send you or sell you my architectural plans for a couple of reasons first of all they're the intellectual property of my architect I can't sell them secondly you are likely in a different Market than me and you I highly advise you to find a good local architect that understands your local building codes because they vary by state and by locality that are understands your local architectural Styles local construction methods because they vary state to state East Coast to West Coast and in your local architectural Styles and work with a good local professional to design a great project architectural is not where I recommend skimping money on just like you wouldn't skimp money on lawyers right get a good real estate attorney not some Bargain Basement strip mall attorney right it's going to pay for itself so are you you ready to go deeper and see my actual numbers on this project let's dive in but before we do that I have a really cool free resource for you I I put together a six-page detailed itemized due diligence checklist for when you're buying land this can save you a a an insane amount of mistakes and problems and money loss down the road if you're buying land for yourself to to develop and if you go to rehab val. com you can no strings attached get full access to this checklist download it save it follow it I it it's seriously an invaluable piece of let's call it literature that I've put together from from years and years of experience and and and making some of the mistakes that I now avoid because I followed this checklist so rehab val. com you can get this completely free all right so let's let's dive into the costs all right so obviously I use rehab Bor to do all my deal due diligence underwriting Financial modeling and we also use it for tracking our ongoing costs throughout the project and then we use it for reporting and for lender draws as well but here are my full final cost for this project you can see here I have soft costs broken down against hard costs and this project came in at $12.

30 square foot $12. 30 per square foot in soft costs and 18347 in hard costs and you can see where my variances were and actually my biggest cost overrun ended up being in the soft costs so let me let me break this down really quick so under soft costs I have architectural MEP which stands for mechanical electrical Plumbing drawings and civil drawings I have Consulting actual permits survey and Engineering fees and holding costs and I can break these down further so my architectural plants here I was largely on budget you can see my plants cost me about $277 a foot and so we we usually say for commercial building code you should budget between two and three bucks a foot for architectural and then about a buck is usually what I budget for MEP drawings a buck for structural and interestingly enough my biggest cost overun here was for my civil drawings I originally thought that because this site is so small and we are not going to be required to do storm water retention which I was correct about I thought we would not need civil drawings but when we submitted for building permits I was informed that we do need to provide civil drawings for this project because it is commercial and so this is where my biggest cost overun versus budget was in you can see here I had nothing budgeted for civil drawings so then building permits pretty self-explanatory I've got main building permit Electrical Plumbing mechanical work work in the street permits and then survey and Engineering fees initial survey work survey work during construction as built survey and by the way we have in our software pre-built budget templates which we give you for all kinds of constructions and they have pre-built scopes of work and some rough costs similar to what you're seeing here so if if if you're new to development or just need a shortcut we provide you with all this stuff so that's my soft cost my my biggest cost overrun was a needing civil drawings and so you can see I I typically for these projects I budget about $10 a foot for soft costs for smaller projects that are less square feet this number tends to go up because we have fixed costs my architect is going to charge me less per square foot for a larger project than he is for a smaller project so here we're a little bit higher than what I typically budget which is which is 10 bucks a foot now let's go through my heart costs and and I'm going to go through this fairly quickly I'm going to show you some construction pictures and then I'm going to show you a breakdown and this is really what I want you to stick around for I'm going to show you a breakdown of exactly what here I would not have to do if I was building by residential code and how this essentially amounts to over $30 a foot extra because I have to build by Commercial Code so my hard costs are broken down we've got demo we had to remove a tree that's really most of the demo dumpsters fencing pretty self-explanatory this largely came in on budget dumpsters toilets periodic job site cleanup fence rental utilities so I needed to run a new Wastewater lateral to the street I needed to run a new domestic water connection to the street and then a new fire line connection so again we're building by commercial building code so we need a sprinkler system and so not only do I have to pay to install the sprinkler system but I have to run a separate water line to the street for water specifically for the sprinkler system and then we have Labor to run all of these laterals to the street so this largely came in on budget and then we've got site work so obviously we had to scrape the lot and then when we scraped a lot and when we removed that tree in the rear that tree had such deep roots that it created this giant gash in the back of the lot and it's not as simple as back filling it with dirt we had to back fill it with stone and compact it otherwise eventually when we put parking in it would have settled so this cost quite a bit of money so you can see here budget versus actual right my site work came in at about $13 a foot and this includes digging and pouring Footers concrete for Footers and then building the foundation so once we scraped a lot we started to dig Footers and then we pour concrete into the Footers and start building the found block foundation on top of the Footers and then back fill it with stone so that my plumber can then come in and run groundw work which is all the plumbing mainly sewer line that goes underneath the concrete slab so 65 $66,000 for site work including Footers and foundation and then all of my concrete costs are here right so we need we needed a lot of stone $8,000 of stone to backfill the slab and then insulation you can see here in the pictures insulation for the slab and then all the concrete $11,200 for concrete to pour the slab and then we pay labor to pour that slab and to finish that concrete so you can see here we put re we put mesh on top of the stone and then pour the concrete slab and then we're ready to start framing so my other concrete costs here were I had to pour an ADA ramp in order to make this Ada accessible so this added quite a bit of costs to the project and then we'll talk about balconies here in a second so overall my concrete for this project cost me $53,000 or about $10. 5 a foot and and again because this was a small project I did not have to do a storm water retention facility here which which is actually nice because it saved me quite a bit of money and and the cool thing here is if as I'm auditing this at the end of the project I can click any one of these cost categories and I can see boom when we paid somebody for it so let's move on to framing right once the concrete slab is poured we're ready to start Framing and framing came in between materials and labor at almost $23 a foot over $2 over budget now let's see where we went over budget I underestimated my main structure Lumber all of my 2x4s 2x sixs I I underestimated and we end up having to buy quite a bit more lumber so you can see almost $2 a foot extra in Lumber my lumber here cost me almost $60,000 not including my floor and roof Tres so and again if I want to audit this I can click and I can see every transaction that we paid out for lumber throughout the project and my bookkeeper goes in and enters these values into the software so trusses cost me another $116,000 so Lumber materials alone for this project were over $775,000 or roughly close to $15 a foot and then my labor ended up coming in higher I underestimated that a little bit because there were some additional labor costs that had to do with specifics for structural drawings that my my labor my my framer end up charging for so labor came in at six bucks a foot and then the staircase stair towers and then we actually did not end up having to use a crane here we used the L so you can see my framing on this project came in at $115,000 or just under $23 a foot so the building is framed that my framer installs windows and patio doors my windows and patio doors came in at $33,750 right on budget and you can see and I got bids for Windows way ahead of time right so my windows came in on budget 19,000 and then all of my exterior doors including my patio my fiberglass patio doors here came in just under $115,000 for this project so overall pretty pretty un budget and then once the windows and doors are framed up we install the roof and we dried the building in and so this is a drone shot right after we completed the roof and the balconies which we'll talk about in a second but it's a rubber roof and one of the things to point out here is is and I'll talk about this more in the video the the design of this roof really required it was a it was more of a complicated roof design than I normally like because it had parid walls and parit walls require pretty expensive metal roof coping you can see here in the rear and in the front metal coping and so let's look at our Roofing costs my roof came in including metal coping at $185,000 out of that materials for the main roof were $8,000 labor to install the main roof was $4,000 and then material and labor for coping just the metal coping around the roof was over 6,600 bucks so here are my cost for my roof $3.

7 a square foot and then once the roof is on we start installing balconies now I had a fairly this was an experiment this was a fairly expensive balcony design because it required I wanted big big balconies 8T deep 18 ft wide so we decided to do this for the first time and we did this across the street we installed steel columns running all the way up and then we attached to the steel columns these steel decks for the second and third floor and then we put concrete inside those decks to form up our balconies so from a process standpoint this was fairly easy to execute but not cheap let's look at my steel costs if we go to metal you can see my structural steel from my balconies was $23,000 and then I had additional cost here for the railings we used powdercoated aluminum rails on the balconies you can see this is the concrete being poured and then I had a railings on the first floor all along the handicap ramp and because this is a commercial project we have to make the first floor apartment handicap accessible so just the handicap rails alone cost me $14,000 that's a big big cost all right let's keep it let's keep it going cuz there's a lot more I want to cover here so once my balconies are done we start doing trade ruins so you can see here where my Plumbing came in basically on budget we had a couple of cost over runs but my Plumbing here including all the materials was just under $9 a foot tubs and diverters water heaters labor came in right on budget and our trim out materials are I under budgeted for so we end up having to spend an extra $2,300 on trim out materials here no shower doors because we use single piece fiberglass tubs so that's Plumbing electrical was just a little bit over budget at $162 a foot or $58,000 in this project and electrical included all the labor and wire all of the light fixtures and again you can see I under budgeted a little bit because we end up going with more expensive light fixtures here we had to dig a conduit for the power company on the outside I under budgeted that as well and then we had a low voltage contract here in our low voltage they in that includes all the security cameras as well as access controls for the building and so this came in right on budget so including low voltage and all the materials my electrical was $1. 62 a foot and then my H rack was just under $10 a foot here fully on budget so we roughen Electrical Plumbing H into the walls and then we start insulating hanging drywall and then painting So my insulation here was right on budget at $2 a foot drywall and paint we actually came in ahead of budget I I overestimated how much drywall we were going to need and so my drywall on paint all in came in just under $9 a foot or $44,000 in this project once drywall and painting is finished we move on to doors trim and casework including countertops so you can see here we installed kitchen cabinets we installed bathroom vanities and we installed mudrooms as well and my cost here for all of the kitchens appliances and countertops for the four Apartments came in just over $56,000 or $120 a foot and so I went over budgeted on a couple of things here I overs spent on the cabinets because I really wanted really big kitchens with big islands and we opted to go for full height Pantry cabinets which are expensive it would have been cheaper just to frame in a normal Pantry with a door and some wire shelves same thing on my quarts I I went over budget here because we we wanted big deep 8 foot Islands here really luxurious my vanity number here is actually in well so so actually scratch what I just said right because my vanity number here was included with my cabinets so so my cabinets were actually on budget my quartz was over budget but then I saved a decent amount of money on appliances because I shopped around so all in all we actually ended up saving money versus my budget here so casework is installed then we do trade trim out which is where the plumber electrician and HVAC come in now now that the walls are done painting is done they they put up light fixtures they put in plumbing fixtures and they put in grills for the HVAC units and then last thing that we do in the project is we install flooring so you can see here my flooring came in just over so my interior doors and trim came in at$ 23,6 78 or 4. 7 bucks a foot and then my flooring I end up saving some money versus Budget on my flooring floring came in at $2,448 or just over $425 cents a foot and you will notice if you watch my videos that we really like to look at almost everything in a dollar per foot basis because that's really to me the best way to standardize from Project to project and be able to estimate from Project to project efficiently right so flooring came in on the first floor we put down 20 mil lvp on the second and third floor we actually Nam nail down 3/4 in Oak Hardwoods and so here are all my flooring costs and then once flooring is done it's a matter of coming in and just putting up all the accessories blinds wire shelving closet shelving etc etc so what you will notice is I've got a whole category here called grading and Landscaping and I've got a whole category here called other and so under grading and Landscaping we had some things that really went over budget which is finish grading and the reason why finish grading went over budget is because we had to bring up the rear parking up significantly in order to make the grade level with the building to make it handicap accessible and then we had to build the retaining wall because now we brought the grade up so much and I've got Paving parking lot here this is what Paving the parking lot cost me and then obvious ly I did not budget for this retaining wall that we had to build in the rear so this was an extra $8,200 so all in all my my grading my grading and Landscaping came in almost $3 a foot over what I had originally budgeted because I did not account for some of the existing site conditions that we would have to tackle but the good news is I had a big contingency in here that we only ate into by 8,300 bucks so what I lost here in grading and Landscaping I'm more than made up in by not eating into my entire contingency right the things that fell into the contingency is just a bunch of random things here that you can see tinting stairwell Windows because that elevation just happened to receive a lot of sun mudrooms I didn't really budget originally for the mud rooms but I wanted to build mud rooms in each apartment and that cost me 5,300 bucks and so so I put that into my contingency so so you can see here having a really healthy contingency in your budget helps to make sure that your project actually comes in relatively on budget so what I lost here I'm more than made up for with my contingency so hopefully this gives you some insights into the cost right again this project came in all in all between soft and hard cost at $195 and7 a square foot or just under $3 a foot over what I had originally budgeted so now let let me show you some really important data points so take a look at this this is what this project encountered as additional costs because we had to build it by commercial building code and these are some very good data points so the column on the left is the gross dollar amount column in the middle is dollars per square foot and on right is dollars per unit so if I was building by residential code so in my market it's single family homes and duplexes in some markets you can build triplexes and quads by Residential Building Code building code is different state to state and sometimes localities to localities so I'll touch base on that deeper in a second but in my market if I'm building single family homes or duplexes I can build them by Residential Building Code if I'm building triplexes and bigger I'm building them by Commercial Code so because I'm building here a quad by commercial building code I needed to have civil drawings I needed to have engineered mechanical electrical and plumbing drawings whereas if I'm building a single family home we don't need to draw to submit for permits Electrical Plumbing your mechanical drawings at all I needed structural drawings professionally engineered I needed a fire suppression system a sprinkler system in this building which is great it's it's better for everyone's safety I'm all for installing sprinkler systems they do add quite a bit to the cost but ultimately it helps protect my tenants so that's great so not but not only do we need to install a sprinkler system throughout the building but now we need to install a separate fire alarm system to monitor that sprinkling sprinkler system and alert the fire department and the monitoring company in case there is a fire so the fire mon fire suppression system added over $5 a foot to this project 20 almost $26,000 or $6,400 per unit but then fire monitoring system added another $115 per square foot to this project and now not only do I need to install a sprinkler system and a fire alarm system but I now also need to run as I mentioned in the beginning of this video a separate water line to the main running in in the street to feed the sprinkler system so there's a there's a regular water line that supplies water to my apartments for showering toilets but then there's a completely separate fire line that needs to run and that cost me an additional $9,600 including connection fees that I have to pay to the city because I have to pay them a separate connection fee for that fir line and not only that but I also need a backflow preventor specifically for the fire line as as well so all in all you can see just the fire suppression requirement added five let me let me turn on my laser pointer here again or actually even better I got I can do a highlighter so look just a fire suppression alone added this added this added this so over $10 a foot just for spr sprinkler and then again because I'm building by commercial building code I have to have ground either a ground floor Ada accessible apartment or I need to have an elevator in my building that takes handicap tenants to the second and third floor in this case it's only 4unit building and there's no elevator it would not have made any Financial sense to install an elevator so I had to make the ground floor apartment and there is only one that can be Ada accessible I had to make it Ada accessible so as I mentioned we had to do all kinds of extra site work in order to make that one apartment on the ground floor Ada accessible and in a small project like this it it's really it really doesn't pencil out that great right so the additional site work pouring the concrete Ada ramp and installing the big powder coated aluminum rail along that handicap ramp added over $55 a square foot to this project and then we had to pave the parking lot and do additional site work and then the last thing that really increased the cost here to build by commercial building code is just the additional costs of Mechanical plumbing and electrical work that had to be performed on residential projects on a dollar per foot basis this work tends to be cheaper so you can see on this project commercial building code added over $32 a square foot or $40,000 per door to my costs and this is given the fact that I did not have to do a storm water retention or Detention Facility if I had to do that we would have probably had another $10 a foot added onto the costs so this is this is this was a very interesting exercise for me to perform but should also provide you some very good data points on building by residential versus commercial code at least this is what I'm experiencing in my market so if I were to do this project over again and still build the quad there's a couple of things that I could have done differently to generate some savings so let me go through that first of all a simpler roof design as I mentioned in the beginning instead of just doing a flat roof or a shingle roof with gutters on the outside of the roof we built the architectural design here called for a parapet wall when you build parapet walls you need to put a cap on top of that wall to keep rain from going into the wall so the metal coping around this parit wall added over $66,000 to the cost between materials and labor so the roof design could have been simpler different balcony designs this was an experiment on my end I wanted to I wanted to play around with this construction method and see if we liked it and see what true costs really ended up being but on a small building this size it it really we could have built balconies a lot cheaper this is a lot of structural steel this is a lot of concrete now in order to get balconies this big onto the building right because these are 8T Deep by almost 20 ft wide I don't think we could have gotten around using structural steel here we could have potentially done it with 6X sixes running all the way up but structural steel to get to generate balconies this big likely would have been required anyway but there is a cheaper way to design these balconies this is a lot of Steel a lot of concrete this added over $20,000 to my costs if not more and then we could have done cheaper kitchens again uh Pantry full Pantry High cabinets are expensive 8ot islands are expensive if I had to save money here I could have toned down my kitchen designs a little bit and then all of these apartments are 1100 square foot or bigger if I really had to generate savings here I probably could have reduced My overall size of my apartments by by 50 to 100 square F feet and still had really great Apartments all generated probably similar rents but I could have saved some money there so I hope this is helpful right so if you if you've made it this far in the video you're you're probably asking so what's the story should I should I bother should I buil quads l so here's what I would say some things you should consider first of all look at local building code look at where your residential code switches over to your commercial code where does Commercial Code get triggered look at your storm water retention requirements where does where does it trigger for you to start collecting storm water on site instead of just dropping it via down spouts onto onto the sidewalk or the street look at where your ADA requirements kick in at what unit count because all of these things add significantly to your cost and code varies by state I I pulled this chart from a site and I want to give credit to the site but I found this chart to be very helpful building codes vary state to state and in some states there is on top of the State Building Code each locality overlays their own requirements and and and and and codes so this chart shows you where you have us individual State building codes in Green State and local and where in which states building code varies County to County and so you need to research your local building code to see where residential commercial code switches over to commercial building code because once it switches over the commercial building code costs go up quite a bit and you may decide that it's not worth building by commerci building code unless you're building a larger project where you can amortise all of those costs over more Apartments I'd also consider your experience level I a lot of people that watch our YouTube videos are are are newer investors or a lot of you guys are are are rehabbers that want to switch into development and I recommend for anybody when you're starting in development do what I did which is start by building by residential code you don't have to engineer your drawings you don't have to do a lot of the stuff that I just showed you and so it's a great way to learn start small start building my Residential Building Code and and and evolve into larger projects when you feel comfortable and then at the end of the day what this ultimately comes down to is do the numbers work ultimately that's all that matters right I just showed you that this project because I chose to build by commercial building code four units instead of a duplex added $30 a foot to my costs but the number is still penciled out this project is fully leased it cash flows great and in the end it's going to make me a lot of money so at the end of the day what truly matters is not cost per unit cost per square foot but when you underwrite the deal do the numbers pencil out so to that end we have a ton of training on our YouTube channel so make sure you subscribe I mean we've got videos on finding land we've got videos on evaluating what you should pay for land on full development process on getting financing for your development projects I mean everything you can think of and we're constantly adding more and more content to our YouTube channel and and of course the software that I've personally been building and and tweaking and improving for the last almost 15 years rehab valuator helps you with deal analysis deal underwriting truly seeing whether the deal will pencil out or not we give you data on owners and Property Data Nationwide sales comps Nationwide rental comps Nationwide so if you're building to rent we give you Nationwide rental comps that you can pull instantly for every bedroom type in order to create your performance to see if your project will pencil out and of course a fullscale project management Suite to help you plan your projects budget your projects schedule your projects but also track them in real time so you have Clarity and granularity into your data and then of course we help you create deal funding pitches for your lenders private lenders hard money lenders banks that look like this that help you secure funding for your deals so I hope you found this video valuable leave me leave me your comments questions below leave me your thoughts I I try to respond to everybody in the comments and then of course if if you don't have the software yet you can go to rehab val.