With a lack of affordable housing in the Orlando-to-Tampa corridor, a new company is angling to build more of it by using prefabricated steel construction and by reusing the same apartment building prototype over and over again, sourcing its own materials and using its own in-house construction crews.
The plan is for Inception Housing to be able to cut down on construction costs and ultimately charge tenants lower rents because it’ll function as its own general contractor. Through direct negotiation with suppliers domestically and abroad, Inception intends to bypass traditional distributors and subcontractors, shortening the supply chain and eliminating several layers of markup.
Inception is a joint venture of PTM Partners, a Fort Lauderdale-based real estate investment and development firm that has built projects in Miami, St. Petersburg and Washington, D.C.; and Peacock Capital, a Winter Park-based real estate owner and operator focused on apartment communities in Central Florida.
“We wanted to get back to basics, where we can develop a structure where a lot of the components are repurposed or reusable. So the actual physical structure itself, from the foundation up, is the same from project to project to project,” Nicholas Pantuliano, chief development officer and chief operations officer for PTM Partners, told GrowthSpotter.
“That allows us to do a ‘rinse and repeat’ and build on the lessons learned from the last one for the next one.”
Inception Housing will use cold-formed steel framing to improve the resilience and long-term affordability of its 30-unit prototype buildings. (Courtesy of Inception Housing)
Regarding Inception’s vertically integrated platform and the way it controls construction and the supply chain flow, Pantuliano credits that to his and his PTM co-founder’s lengthy employment with the LeFrak Organization, a New York-based developer that serves as its own general contractor.
Inception is planning to build three-story garden-style apartment buildings with 24 to 30 units per building. “It’ll be eight to 10 units per floor, with two-bedroom units on the end,” Pantuliano said. “And everything in the middle – almost like accordion-style – would be one-bedrooms.”
Inception is launching with two projects underway. The first is Magnolia Flats, situated between the Hourglass District and SoDo District in South Orlando, comprising 60 apartments in two new buildings, plus 14 apartments in renovated buildings. The second project is Spring Lake Apartments along U.S. 17 in Winter Haven, which will feature 168 apartments across six buildings.
Last March, the pre-construction activity at Spring Lake – the leveling of the lot – sparked frustration among neighbors who questioned why there was no public notice about the project, but the city of Winter Haven explained that notification wasn’t required because the property had been zoned for multifamily housing for 25 years.
The 13-acre site next to Spring Lake Plaza shopping Center was zoned to allow for multifamily residential back in 1985 but was undeveloped until now. (Polk County Property Appraiser)
Orlando-based Peacock Capital has started building a 168-unit apartment complex on the property at 940 Havendale Blvd., on Lake Mirror. (Site plan by exo Limited)
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The 13-acre site next to Spring Lake Plaza shopping Center was zoned to allow for multifamily residential back in 1985 but was undeveloped until now. (Polk County Property Appraiser)
Inception Housing intends to construct cold-formed steel buildings instead of wood-frame buildings. The steel framing of the buildings is being fabricated at a factory located along the I-4 corridor.
“It’s almost like a cutter-type machine, but it’s a lot more sophisticated … It has the ability to make the floor joists, it has the ability to make all the floor framing, and it provides the knockouts,” Pantuliano said. “It knows if there’s a plumbing knockout necessary, it knows where there’s electrical knockouts, it knows where the HVAC knockout is.”
The prefabricated steel components are then trucked to the construction sites to be assembled.
“They snap it together so it’s rigid, and then it gets screwed together, and you wind up with a flat panel or a flat floor joist that can be put on a flatbed truck, and then stood up at the actual project site itself,” Pantuliano said. “When it’s assembled, it’s orders of magnitude more rigid than a wood frame building.”
“Wood frame buildings are going to go away in the overall Florida market because of the strength-to-weight ratio, the water infiltration issues, the mold issues, termites and whatnot,” he added. “All of the associated things that you can imagine for wood frame buildings, this sidesteps in a lot of ways.”
Inception Housing says it’s targeting affordable workforce housing for middle-income renters earning between 80% and 120% AMI (area median income), without the need for government concessions and subsidies.
“How do you attack the affordability issue? And make a product that is truly affordable for first responders, teachers, the people that are vital for a city to function,” Pantuliano said. “A lot of it just comes from construction costs.”
The Orlando area’s lack of affordable housing is well documented. In March, an annual report from the National Low Income Housing Coalition said the region’s shortage of affordable housing for low-income earners was the worst in America – and the rankings weren’t much better for average earners. For middle earners, the Orlando area had 82 housing units for every 100 families, which represented the fourth decline in a row. The coalition considers the Orlando region to include Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties.
“We’re excited to bring something to the market that will actually help solve the problem,” Pantuliano said. “If we can get it to scale, the hope is that we can do something successful, but also something that’s a benefit to the current issue that the state’s facing.”
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