On a mission to provide as many housing units as possible at an affordable cost for the working class, Resia develops, builds, and manages multi-family rental communities across the country. The company’s slogan, “Apartment Living Reimagined”, speaks to their reimagined business model—a vertically integrated model where they optimized everything from development and design, to construction.
By being ultra-efficient, they aim to pass along the savings to their middle-class customers while providing them with modern, quality apartments and great communities to call home.
But the one missing link to this vertically integrated model was land acquisition. As the company continued to scale, it began to take a hard look at how it could streamline its site planning process, find the best scenarios, and close the right deals faster and easier.
Resia’s Need to Solve their Land Deals Fast
Prior to using TestFit, Resia was working in CAD to plan their sites. As a result, the land acquisition team was spending all their time sending CAD files back and forth with architects, even for the most minor plan changes, like moving a parking space. The whole process would take them at least 1 week, sometimes even 2, to get a site study done—let alone multiple options with multiple sites.
Because of the volume of units they need to build every year, they have to look at 10 times more deals to find the best ones. So the team had to find a way to accelerate their site planning efforts without sacrificing the quality of finding the right deals.
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Resia’s Search for a Customizable Platform
To start, the Resia team evaluated over 10 different platforms before deciding that TestFit was the best solution for their business model. They were looking for a tool that could check off all their requirements:
- Faster execution, allowing them to accelerate their massing studies to close deals faster
- More autonomy, giving the land acquisition team ownership and freeing up architects’ time
- More analysis, enabling the team to analyze as many deals as possible to find the right ones
The team kept coming back to TestFit during the evaluation process not only because it met all the core criteria, but also because it offers the customization that Resia needed. From the very beginning, Resia was able to import its configuration and standards into TestFit without compromising its existing unit standards—a feature that other platforms couldn’t offer in their evaluation.
Making the Switch: From CAD to TestFit
For about 3-4 months, Selma developed a process to evaluate TestFit in the land acquisition team. She would have one person do a study within TestFit while another team of 4 continues their usual CAD process.
She found that the 1-person team was able to get a test fit done much faster than the 4-person team. With the support from the TestFit team, they started training more team members to use TestFit across multiple deals at once.
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Reduce Deal Process from 2 Weeks to 2 Hours
With the customization in place, instead of guessing what site layout would work best on a particular site, Resia uses TestFit to analyze every possible scenario to make the right decisions on deals.
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Resia’s land acquisition team were able to reduce the amount of time spent on getting underwriting done from 2 weeks to 2 hours, while analyzing 6-12 scenarios all at once. Small changes to a site plan can take place within the land acquisition team, quickly inside TestFit, instead of waiting for days for a revision to be made.
The efficiency in time also means better control in how they use the extra time. Traditionally, only 5% of site studies continued to be a closed deal. Now instead of wasting time on the other 95% that will never get built, their architects can actually do the things that they’re skilled at—designing real buildings.
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