Find Out If Your Garden Apartment Site Pencils
Start from a market-rate garden community of three-story breezeway walkups with mid-size one- to three-bedroom units, fitted to your parcel. You see unit count, parking and density before you commit.
How Many Garden Apartments Will Fit My Site?
TestFit is real estate feasibility software that generates site plans on your parcel and calculates what they yield. For a market-rate garden community, the answer comes down to three things that are hard to judge from a parcel map.
Parking sets the count
Surface parking for a market-rate mix competes with the buildings for the same land. Where the stalls go decides how many units the site can carry.
Parcel shape decides the rows
Breezeway buildings line up along drive aisles. A narrow or angled parcel can leave room for a row of parking but not the building behind it.
Fire access shapes the drives
Fire-access drive aisles keep trucks moving. Those drives set the street grid every building hangs off.
From Your Parcel to a Deal You Can Underwrite
Start from the market-rate 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: 3-story breezeway walkups, 10.5 ft floor to floor (31.5 ft), mid-size 1 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.
We do initial pro formas and tell clients, ‘Hey, this doesn’t make sense.’ We’ve shown them 10 different schemes in TestFit… and nothing pencils out. Sometimes more is not better… You end up spending more money and getting less return. TestFit helps us and our clients make decisions.
Market-Rate Breezeway Walkups Site Planning FAQ
What is a garden-style apartment?
A low-rise apartment community, usually two to four stories, with several buildings spread across a larger site and surface parking around them. Garden product is common in suburban and Sun Belt markets.
What is a breezeway walkup?
A garden building with open-air stairs between unit stacks instead of an interior corridor or elevator. Residents walk up from a covered breezeway, which keeps common area and construction cost low.
How much land does a garden apartment community need?
Parking usually needs more land than the buildings. The parcel has to fit the buildings, the parking courts and fire-access drives. Load your parcel in TestFit with this layout to see how many units fit.
What unit mix does this layout use?
Mid-size one-, two- and three-bedroom units, the conventional market-rate mix. You can change the mix and unit sizes after the layout generates.
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.