Who we serve · Acquisition & due-diligence teams
For acquisition and due-diligence teams
You are underwriting renovation cost from a walk, a rent roll and an assumption — and the assumption is where deals get repriced after closing.
Book a pre-acquisition walkWhat that means in practice
- Unit-by-unit condition and cost before close, not a blended per-unit assumption
- The underneath conditions a standard property condition assessment does not cover
- Deliverable in a form you can drop into the model
- The document is yours regardless of who performs the work
The assumption is where deals get repriced
Renovation cost in an MHC acquisition is usually underwritten as a per-unit figure applied across some proportion of the rent roll. It is fast, it is defensible in an IC memo, and it is the single most common source of a post-close surprise.
The reason is that the variance between homes in the same community is enormous. Two homes on adjacent lots, same year, same model, can differ by a factor of four in what it costs to make them rentable — because one has a sound floor system and the other does not, and nothing visible from the doorway tells you which is which.
A per-unit average across that distribution is not a forecast. It is a bet on the mix.
What a pre-acquisition walk produces
A unit-by-unit record: condition, recommended scope, and cost itemized line by line for every home, plus the community-level items that belong to no single home.
| Per home | Turn, remodel or replace — with the scope and cost for the recommended path |
|---|---|
| Envelope | Roof condition and remaining service life, siding, windows, doors, skirting |
| Floor system | Sounded, not eyeballed. This is the largest single cost variable between homes. |
| Underneath | Belly wrap, insulation, piers, anchors — the section a unit walk cannot see |
| Per lot | Grade and drainage, entries, utility stub condition where visible |
| Vacant lots | Infill readiness and what each would cost to bring to occupancy |
What a standard PCA does not cover
A property condition assessment is a building-systems report. It is useful and it is not the same document.
It tells you what is wrong. It does not tell you what it costs to make each home rentable at your target rent — which is the number the model needs — and it typically does not go underneath the homes at all.
The three conditions most consistently absent from MHC renovation underwriting:
Belly wrap and underfloor insulation. Invisible from a walk, and the reason subfloors keep failing. Underwriting a floor repair without the belly work is underwriting the repair twice.
Piers and anchors. Settlement presents as drywall cracks and doors that will not latch, which get costed as drywall and doors. The actual cost is the leveling nobody scoped.
Drainage. Where lots fall toward homes, everything underneath is on a clock and the renovation has a shorter service life than the model assumes.
Vacant lots are underwritten separately, and usually wrong
Vacant lots in an acquisition model are frequently valued at an infill cost drawn from an industry average — commonly cited around four to six months and fifteen to thirty thousand dollars per lot.
That average conceals the variables that actually decide it: lot condition, utility stub condition, delivery access inside the community, and whether the state's installer licensing regime permits your intended contractor to perform the set at all. See infill.
The document is yours
The walk is priced as its own scope. If you close and competitively bid the work, you still hold a materially better basis than an assumption — and if you do not close, you have a defensible reason.
We would rather be the contractor whose diligence numbers held up than the one who tied the report to the award.
Common questions
Other owner types
- REITs & institutional operatorsYou are answerable to a board and to public reporting, so the question is never whether a vendor can do the work — it is whether their documentation survives an audit and whether their numbers roll up.
- Private-equity park ownersYou are executing a value-add thesis against a hold period and an exit date, so the binding constraint is not cost per unit — it is how many units you can actually turn per quarter and whether the spend shows up in the rent roll before the model needs it to.
- Property management companiesYou are accountable to an owner for work you do not perform, with a vendor file that is slow to open and a contractor who answers a different phone in every market.
- Independent park ownersYou own one or two communities, you are the asset manager and the property manager, and a national contractor sounds like somebody who will not return your call and will price you like an enterprise.
- Community managersThe crew working your community reflects on you every day — and a crew that leaves debris, blocks a resident's drive or argues with a tenant creates a week of work for you that has nothing to do with construction.
- Commercial property ownersRoofing is a capital item you deal with once a decade per building, which means you are negotiating from a standing start against a contractor who does this daily — and the bids in front of you are not comparable.