Most build-to-rent pro formas open with the rent and hope the rest holds. This one opens with the cost, because the cost is the part we control. Twenty doors — ten duplexes — built on a Wichita basis:
Those two yield numbers are the whole reason to build instead of buy. Here is how the phase gets there — and where a green operator hands it back.
A phase, not a house
Twenty doors is the point. One duplex is a project; ten of them, built the same way, is a program — and a program is how capital actually gets deployed. Each duplex runs about $310,000 all-in, land included, two rentable units. Ten of them is a ~$3.1M phase at roughly $155,000 a door to create — a number you cannot touch buying finished product in most of the country.
Where the yield lives
A development yield is set the day you buy the dirt and the day you lock the build — not the day you sign the lease. We carry finished lots near $29,000 against a retail range closer to $45,000 to $61,000, and we build at about $108 a square foot, construction only — below the $161 to $178 the Midwest averages. Stack a low land basis on a disciplined build cost and the yield is in the deal before a tenant ever tours it.
The spread is the opportunity
Here is what a funded operator sees that a homebuyer doesn’t. The build-to-rent industry underwrites ground-up development to a 7 to 8% yield on cost — and against core cap rates near 4.75%, that thin spread is the entire business. Build on a Wichita basis and the same phase pencils at 12 to 15%. That is not a better cap rate; it is roughly double the development yield, on a spread wide enough to absorb a cost overrun, a slow lease-up, or a soft quarter and still land in the money.
The rent does its part without heroics. A two-bedroom in Wichita runs about $1,081 a month, and a new build-to-rent home — a yard, its own walls, current finishes — rents above that. Put that rent on a ~$3.1M basis and the phase throws off roughly $370,000 to $460,000 of stabilized net operating income. The yield isn’t a forecast. It falls out of the two numbers you already locked.
Where the math still works
Build-to-rent is not a fad to get in front of — it is already an institutional asset class. It now accounts for about 7.2% of all single-family construction starts, off its 2024 peak but well above the sub-6% share it never used to cross before 2022. The category is here to stay. What changed is that national yields compressed as everyone crowded into the same Sunbelt submarkets.
That is exactly why the basis matters more, not less. When the industry is fighting over a 7% yield, a market that still delivers 12 to 15% isn’t a curiosity — it is where disciplined capital goes once the obvious trade gets crowded. Wichita never ran up, so the math that stopped working on the coasts still works here.
If you’re deploying capital
A 20-door phase works because the margin lives in the cost basis, not a rosy rent forecast — and because someone who has run the play dozens of times is holding the numbers. That combination is provable to the dollar, repeatable phase after phase, and rare enough that most capital never sees it until it is standing on the lot. If you can see the opportunity, the next step is small: send the land, or the basis you’re weighing, and we’ll model the phase on your actual numbers.