See What a Fourth Story Adds to Your Garden Site
Start from a market-rate garden community of four-story elevator buildings with studio to three-bedroom units, fitted to your parcel. You see unit count and parking before you price the elevators.
Will Four-Story Elevator Garden Apartments Fit My Site?
TestFit is real estate feasibility software that generates site plans on your parcel and calculates what they yield. For an elevator garden community, the answer comes down to three things that are hard to judge from a parcel map.
A fourth story adds units
Elevators make a fourth floor work. The extra floor adds units on the same footprint, and the height has to clear zoning at 42 ft.
Parking grows with the unit count
Every unit on the fourth floor needs parking on the ground. The parking field grows faster than the building footprint.
Elevators and corridors cost area
Interior corridors and elevator cores take floor area that a breezeway walkup does not. Efficiency changes with the building type.
From Your Parcel to a Deal You Can Underwrite
Start from the elevator garden community your team would build, tune it to your standards, and finish with one model for the site, plan, tabulation and pro forma.
Your parcel and its constraints
- Site boundary: pick the parcel from built-in parcel data with current owner info, draw it, enter metes and bounds, or import a KML/KMZ file
- Setbacks and frontage: front, side and rear setbacks set to the parcel edges
- Zoning: FAR, building and impervious coverage, height limits and parking ratios, pulled in for your parcel so you don't have to dig through the zoning code
- Easements: areas the layout keeps buildings out of
- Site conditions: flood zones, wetlands and topography from Site Intelligence
Every layout starts inside your site's real constraints.
Your product, fine-tuned on the site
- Product: 4-story elevator buildings with interior corridors, 10.5 ft floor to floor (42 ft), studio to 3 BR units, balconies
- Site layout: surface parking courts on fire-access drive aisles
- Your edits: unit mix, unit sizes, buildings, parking and drives
You see the building your team would propose, on your parcel.
A source of truth for the deal
- Site plan geometry: buildings, courts, parking and drives drawn to the parcel
- Tabulation for this product: building sf, dock doors, trailer and car stalls against what's required, site coverage and FAR
- Earthwork: cut and fill for the layout
- Financials: the geometry turned into development costs, revenue and returns
- Shareable results: a link or PDF report for your team, partners and other stakeholders
You know whether the deal works, with numbers to back it.
It’s completely changed the way we think. Instead of parking first, we’re thinking about building first.
Market-Rate Elevator Garden Site Planning FAQ
What is an elevator garden apartment?
A garden community of three- to four-story buildings served by elevators and interior corridors, still surface parked. It sits between a breezeway walkup and a wrap or podium building.
Why add elevators to garden product?
Elevators make a fourth story practical and open the community to renters who will not climb stairs. The tradeoff is more common area and cost per unit.
How tall are the buildings in this layout?
Four stories at 10.5 ft floor to floor, 42 ft tall.
How many units fit on my site?
It depends on parcel shape, parking and unit mix. Load your parcel in TestFit with this layout to see the unit count and density.
Can I change the layout after it generates?
Yes. Start from this layout, then edit the unit mix, buildings, parking and drives in TestFit. The site plan and yield recalculate as you go.
Find it in TestFit
Test This Layout on Your Next Garden Site
Load your parcel and get the site plan, yield, and costs in one place.