Garden — Cheapest Per Unit, Hungriest for Land

Garden product is efficient to build and inefficient with land. Surface parking at typical Florida ratios consumes an enormous share of the site, so the typology only pencils where land cost per unit stays low. When land moves, garden stops working long before construction cost becomes the issue.

The horizontal cost is the part that moves most between sites. Two garden schemes with identical unit counts can differ substantially in what it costs to get roads, utilities, drainage and stormwater across the site, and that difference frequently exceeds anything available in the buildings themselves.

Garden product delivers in discrete buildings, which means the first ones can be leased while the rest are still going up. Six months of earlier lease-up on a third of the units is a material improvement to the return and it costs almost nothing to plan for at the start.

What it does require is that the site work, the amenity and the access are sequenced so an early building is genuinely occupiable rather than sitting finished in the middle of an active site.

1. 01Test the site yield honestly before the pro forma hardens.
2. 02Price the horizontal work properly — it is frequently underestimated.
3. 03Value engineer through repetition rather than through specification.
4. 04Build in phases so lease-up can start before completion.
5. 05Coordinate stormwater and utilities early, since they gate everything.

Phase it so the first buildings deliver while the rest are still going up. Lease-up starting six months earlier changes the return materially, and it costs almost nothing to plan for at the start and a great deal to retrofit later.

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