Discovering Hidden Treasure in Your Unit Amenities – Missing Amenities

November 18, 2024 by Donald Davidoff

This is the second in a 9-part series of “quick hit” blogs on the quickest way to uncover hidden revenue from leasing based on the presentation Bryan Pierce, Carol Enoch and Donald Davidoff gave at NAA’s 2024 Apartmentalize conference.

Last blog, we discussed amenity “holes.” Today, we’ll cover the second in our series of “amenity fails”—missing amenities.

Another common mistake we see are missing amenities—either simply some units obviously missing amenities, or in other cases, a whole category of amenities missing.

Fail #2: Missing Amenities

The former most often happens with things like view amenities. A good example that we’ve seen is a situation where several homes had a “wooded view” while most did not. Unlike the amenity “holes” we discussed in the previous blog, there’s consistency by stack, e.g. the 01 and 02 stacks have the wooded view while the 03 and 04 do not. However, a simple look at Google Maps’ Satellite View clearly shows that the 03 stack has the same wooded view. The 04 stack does not, so at least that’s correct.

The impact? Let’s say it’s just a $25 view on three units (a three-story garden community). That’s $75 a month or $900 a year—$15,000 in hidden value assuming a 6% cap rate.

A good example of the latter is corner units. In most communities, corner units have at least a $10-20 value compared to other units (in urban areas it can be $100 or more). Since this mistake often affects a dozen or more homes, the impact is that much greater. Make sure you have a checklist of all the possible amenity categories so you don’t fall victim to this “fail.”

Stay tuned for the next “quick hit” in this series.