This is the eighth 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.

For our penultimate (yes, I love that word) amenity fail, we turn to floorplan offsets (also called square footage adjustments) that are too high or too low. In our experience, this single fail represents the largest value loss among all the others.

Fail #8: Floorplan Offsets

Finding these requires a different kind of analysis. You need to line up all your floorplans that belong to a unit type (note: we use the convention that units roll up into floorplans which then roll up into unit types; in some software, the convention is that units roll up into unit types which then roll up into floorplans, so beware of the opportunity for confusion when communicating with others).

Then pick a base floorplan (usually the smallest one) for each unit type, and calculate the square foot difference between each floorplan and its base floorplan. Then look at the “square footage offset” on a rent per square foot basis and compare that to the base rent per square foot (rpsf).

We expect the offset rpsf to be lower than the base rpsf since the first square foot is almost always the most expensive. It represents the license to live at the community and access to community amenities. If the offset rpsf is higher than the base rpsf, then you are almost certainly over charging and increasing your vacancy loss. But, as is more often the case, if the offset rpsf is less than 60-70% of the base rpsf, then you are likely not charging enough. In the most egregious cases we’ve encountered with our amenity audit application, we actually see negative offsets on larger homes which clearly makes no sense.

Check out your square footage offsets. We can virtually guarantee there’s some hidden treasure there!

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