Most “deal breakdowns” you find online are national averages dressed up as advice. This one is the opposite — the real shape of a Wichita-metro build-to-rent duplex, built and rented, with the numbers rounded so we protect the people we build for. The figures are representative of what we actually do, not a pitch:
Two rentable units, land included, delivered permit-to-keys in under 120 days. Here is how a number like that gets built — and where a green operator loses it.
Step one: the land is the lever
Everything downstream is set the day you buy the dirt. We carry finished lots at roughly $29,000 against a retail range closer to $45,000 to $61,000 — and that gap, not some trick in the build, is what pulls the yield up. Land is the one line we always state on its own, because it is the lever that decides whether a deal pencils at 8% or 14%.
Step two: the build, disciplined and repeatable
We build at about $108 a square foot, construction only — below the $161 to $178 the Midwest averages, on actuals. That number isn’t luck; it’s repetition. Build the same duplex enough times and the estimate stops being a guess and becomes the invoice. The two lines that move a build most — framing and concrete, together roughly a quarter of the cost — are the two we watch hardest when the market moves.
Step three: the rent, and the yield
Three-bedroom apartments in Wichita run about $1,267 a month; a new build-to-rent home — a yard, no shared walls beyond the party line, current finishes — rents above that. Put market rent against a cost basis this low and new build-to-rent here pencils at 12 to 15% yield on cost — a development yield, not a purchase yield, and roughly double the 7 to 8% the industry underwrites to.
The yield isn’t a claim. It falls straight out of the two numbers above — what we paid for the lot, and what we paid to build. That is the whole trick, and it isn’t a trick.
What a seasoned operator sees that the spreadsheet doesn’t
Every line above pencils cleanly on paper. The deal is not made on paper. It’s made in the dirt — and that is exactly where a good pro forma in the wrong hands turns into a loss. The math is the easy part. Knowing what breaks it is the job:
Overpay for the lot and the yield lever is gone. Let the build run long or over and the margin thins to nothing while carry eats the return. Underwrite a rent the submarket won’t pay and the whole stack is fiction. Pick the wrong product for the street and you own a vacancy. None of those show up on the spreadsheet — they show up eighteen months later, on the bank statement.
The takeaway if you’re deploying capital
A Wichita-metro build-to-rent deal works because the margin lives in the cost basis, not in 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, which is why we publish it every month.