If you’re underwriting a build or waiting on a home, the schedule isn’t a detail — it’s money and it’s patience. Here’s where Wichita lands against the country, permit to keys:
Under four months on our side, against nine on average across the country — and closer to three times faster than the national rental-home build. That gap is the whole story, so it’s worth being honest about both numbers.
The honest national number
Across the U.S., a single-family home now takes about 9.1 months from permit to completion, per the Census Bureau’s Survey of Construction — roughly 1.4 months waiting to start and 7.6 months building. Homes built for sale are the quickest at 7.6 months; rental homes run about 12.5 months, and owner-built homes stretch past 15. And it’s the wrong direction: the average is nearly two months longer than it was a decade ago, thanks to permitting, labor, and material friction.
We deliver in under 120 days
Bids builds permit-to-keys in under 120 days — the majority under 100. Against the national rental-home timeline, that’s roughly a third of the calendar. It isn’t a shortcut and it isn’t corner-cutting; it’s the same Deming discipline that holds our budgets: a schedule built from the trades up, sequenced so nothing waits on nothing, run the same way on every job until the plan and the actual are the same document.
Repetition is what makes it repeatable. Build the same duplex enough times and you stop discovering the schedule and start executing it — the delays other builders treat as weather, we treat as a process problem we already solved.
I’ve watched a deal go the other way
One of my best clients — decades together, a lot of mediocre subcontractors and superintendents fired side by side — was two weeks from breaking ground on the largest syndication of his career: three sites, financed at 4.5%, a nine-month build. At the last minute he got anxious about the number and handed the job to a cheaper GC.
Rates on the stalled project climbed to 9%. Nine months turned into eighteen. At the twenty-month mark, not one door had been rented or sold. That’s when he called: “This was the worst mistake of my life.”
Why speed is yield, not a vanity metric
For an investor, every extra month of construction is carry — loan interest, taxes, insurance, overhead — on a building earning nothing yet. It’s also a month of rent you never collect. Cut the build from twelve months to four and you’ve erased eight months of carry and pulled eight months of rent forward, on every unit. That flows straight into the yield on cost that makes new build-to-rent here pencil.
Which is why the schedule belongs in the underwriting, not the fine print. A builder who actually holds his timeline isn’t doing you a favor — he’s protecting the return you signed up for.