Writing · Leasing & Conversion
Interesting...
Bisnow: When it comes to housing and affordability, people can sometimes talk about modular like it's a silver bullet. Of course, there’s still a big financial market challenge for new development. We know this process saves time, so can you talk me through all the ways, from a financial standpoint, the modular approach benefits a new project?
Mest: The biggest thing that modular delivers versus traditional construction is the delivery of first units or first revenue. Getting those first units 40% to 50% faster than you would traditionally is a huge lift to a project. The lift doesn't come so much on the yield side, that's more of an [internal rate of return] kind of needle-mover. It inherently helps the project overall, because then you're able to service debt at that point where you've got income coming in.
Then you have the ability to lease units faster, right? We're able to turn a larger quantity of units over and bring those to the market quicker, assuming that we have the leasing velocity and the demand behind it.
I think a couple other pieces probably get lost a little bit in translation. There’s also a lot more certainty early on and over the life of the project. If you get into any force majeure conditions, where God forbid, there's a tropical storm or a major kind of shock to the supply chain, by building in the factory, 50% of those costs are well controlled. We don’t have that instability. It’s the same with any sort of ripples or ramifications from anything that could happen in the macro market from a downturn or change in the market.
You're starting to eliminate risk factors that exist on every deal. The time with which they impact you is truncated.
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