Fit House-Scale Apartment Buildings Next to Single-Family
Start from a community of two-story, 8-unit buildings on a single stair, fitted to your parcel. You see how many small buildings and units the site holds while keeping the scale of the street.
How Many Small Apartment Buildings Will Fit My Site?
TestFit is real estate feasibility software that generates site plans on your parcel and calculates what they yield. For a small-building garden community, the answer comes down to three things that are hard to judge from a parcel map.
One stair per building
A single stair keeps each building small: 8 units on two floors. More buildings means more footprints to fit between the drives.
Built for residential neighborhoods
These read as houses from the street, so they fit next to single-family homes. Spacing and setbacks add up fast across many buildings.
Parking for every building
Each small building needs its own stalls nearby. The parking courts have to reach every building on the site.
From Your Parcel to a Deal You Can Underwrite
Start from the small-building 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: 2-story, 8-unit buildings on a single stair, 10.5 ft floor to floor (21 ft), 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.
Single-Stair Small Buildings Site Planning FAQ
What is a single-stair apartment building?
A small multifamily building where every unit is reached from one shared stair instead of two exits. Building codes allow it for small, low buildings, which keeps the footprint compact.
Why use small buildings on a garden site?
Next to single-family neighborhoods, small two-story buildings fit the scale of the street and can ease neighborhood concerns while still adding rental units.
How many units are in each building?
Eight units on two floors, served by one stair.
How many units fit on my site?
It depends on how many buildings the parcel and parking can hold. Load your parcel in TestFit with this layout to see the unit count.
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.