Going In Cap Rates and Yield On Cost - Dev Project Question

Hey guys, was looking over a textbook and wanted to clarify this, example below is for a value add project not ground up.

So Yield on Cost would be Year 1 NOI/Costs (Land, Hard, Soft Costs). So if NOI is $10 and Costs are $100 YoC is 10%. From my understanding if the expected exit cap rate is 100 to 200 basis points lower (sell for at least an 8 cap) depending on overall risk developers are generally comfortable with this to move forward with a project.

That seems to be different than a going in cap rate which will only apply to the land (and building on it). So say out of the $100 in total cost 60% of that is land/building. So the NOI of $10 the first year divided by the $60 for land is a 16.6 cap (seems unrealistic but these are made up numbers).

Would this be an example of build to a 16.6 cap and sell for an 8 cap? I am confused because to me this could be seen as build to a 10 (YoC), sell for an 8.

I feel like I am over complicating it and mixing up concepts that are separate. 

4 Comments
 

A couple of points here:

1) Going-in cap rate isn't really a metric used for ground-up development.  

2) The assumptions used here aren't what you would see in an efficient market

Your example is build to a 10 cap but sell for an 8 cap. Which means that you have created about 25% of additional value by building the project as opposed to just buying a similar product for sale in the market. It is also more common to see the going-in cap rate to be lower than exit cap rate in value-add deals since there is "upside" in the deal. 

 

Wouldn't the going in cap rate be higher or you're just saying it's such a low cap rate on little to no cash flow? I would think the cap rate would be high anyway = low purchase price and once you improve it it would be on a more realistic exit cap at a different NOI. Say $1mm NOI on initial existing asset, 10 cap that's $10mm - not sure why it would be a lower cap rate aka higher purchase price up front?

I know in value add and ground up scenarios it's yield on cost compared to exit cap rate and this would play a part into the overall costs as land basis ($10mm for the building aka land if doing ground up) but in any case I'm not seeing the lower going in cap rate.

 

Some people use the term "Going-in Cap Rate" in different ways. What I was referring to is Cap Rate at purchase price vs. Cap Rate at exit. 

For example if you had a value-add multifamily deal with the following deal metrics:

Unrenovated NOI: $1,000,000

Purchase Price: $25,000,000

Renovation Hard/Soft: $5,000,000

Renovated NOI: $2,000,000

Sales Price: $40,000,000

In this case:

Going-in Cap = $1,000,000 / $25,000,000 = 4%

Yield on Cost = $2,000,000 / $30,000,000 = 6.67%

Exit Cap = $2,000,000 / $40,000,000 = 5%

For this particular deal, the spread between the Exit Cap and YoC is 167 bps which would suggest that it's viable

 
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