September General Meeting
DeHays Outlines the Building Blocks of the Future in Apartment Industry
On Thursday, September 19 nearly 70 members of the Columbus Apartment Association (CAA) met at the Railhouse East Market for the penultimate General Meeting featuring Board Member and innovative developer Brad DeHays of Connect Real Estate and Connect Construction.
The meeting began with Executive Director Laura Swanson welcoming members and new members and making a few general announcements before President Don Brunner introduced DeHays.
DeHays began by giving an history of Connect Real Estate beginning in 2007 with condo conversations and apartment builds and outlining the powerplant building which currently houses their offices and the history of the coal building powerplant that used to power downtown. Connect utilizes tax credit deals for reuse and being creative with capital in doing things that others didn’t do. Ultimately, focusing on historic tax credits, conservation and jobs Ohio grants, to figure out how to be different.
After receiving a call from the City Historic Preservation Director in 2014 DeHays took the 110, 000 square feet over seven years and turned it into office space, fully leased, including the Columbus Crew, a rooftop patio and event space. During the process, DeHays asked if the entities purchasing the Crew and building Lower.com field would leave a corner open which can now be viewed by that rooftop patio.
Moving to the East Market, DeHays noted that building was the most difficult to get capital to renovate in the country that year. Using a combination of grants, state and federal tax credits and more, 13 different law firms combined to make the deal happen.
“This area hadn’t seen an investment of $15 million dollars since they did the addition of the hospital. In total, between this and across the street it’s $62 million dollars put into this market has a pretty big impact,” DeHays said. “This project took forever; it was us trying to figure out how we’re going to do this and not create a gentrification problem right in the middle of the neighborhood.”
Moving on to current projects Connect has in development. Connect had the Ohio Jobs and Family Services building, the Ohio Supreme Court and the Ohio Department of Education put on the National Registry of Historic Places and received a tax credit in 2023 of $7.1 million and another grant of over $5 million. It’s not public yet what will be in the buildings, but it will include a pool and rooftop space.
DeHays outlined what it will take to create the first ever modular apartment development inside a historic building. “We actually got the National Parks Service to allow us to use our modular factory inside of this building. We’re going to cut a bay, six stories tall out of the side of the entire building and we’re going to feed apartments into it,” DeHays said.
Next, DeHays outlined a new project in Marysville. When approached by the City of Columbus about redeveloping a lot that included a pond and creek, but wasn’t quite big enough, he negotiated in grain silos that were adjacent to the property. It did take an additional two years to gain access to the additional land. DeHays described the renderings of what the property will look like when complete, including a sports bar which is lacking in Marysville. The property will also include 264 modular apartments, a gym, a bridge and utilize the essence of the creek. In addition to modular apartments, DeHays is developing 11 townhomes with garages in the same vein as an experiment to see how it will work.
“This is the biggest thing we’ve been doing, for the past five and a half years we’ve created the largest modular apartment factory in the United States. We create our own product. We do a lot of steel framing, the process of steel framing, you can get your precision down. Machines can cut it, they can form it, they can bend it, they can punch it, in our factories we have machines from New Zealand, it took them two years to come in and six months to program and we have eight full-time engineers, our machines will run 4,000 metal feet an hour, we have three of them, we can run an entire wall section, an entire floor section, an entire ceiling section.” DeHays said.
There are several floor plans, from small one-bedrooms to larger one bedrooms, multiple modulars create different floor plans and the modules are sold out through 2027. “Right now, we’re doing two modulars a day in the factory, in 18 months we’ll be doing 10. We need to have projects that ready so that we can feed really quick,” DeHays said. “Just because we don’t have capacity now, that entire paradigm is going to flip because it’s a way for us to drive down costs.”
One thing that can be anticipated with modulars is overlap, noting that the price cannot be beat. The costs are 5-8 percent less in cost and 10 - 15 percent less in soft cost. The reason why is, the apartment complex, next year will be built in five months.
After taking a few questions from the audience, Swanson returned to thank everyone for attending and invite them to the Expo and upcoming events.
The meeting began with Executive Director Laura Swanson welcoming members and new members and making a few general announcements before President Don Brunner introduced DeHays.
DeHays began by giving an history of Connect Real Estate beginning in 2007 with condo conversations and apartment builds and outlining the powerplant building which currently houses their offices and the history of the coal building powerplant that used to power downtown. Connect utilizes tax credit deals for reuse and being creative with capital in doing things that others didn’t do. Ultimately, focusing on historic tax credits, conservation and jobs Ohio grants, to figure out how to be different.
After receiving a call from the City Historic Preservation Director in 2014 DeHays took the 110, 000 square feet over seven years and turned it into office space, fully leased, including the Columbus Crew, a rooftop patio and event space. During the process, DeHays asked if the entities purchasing the Crew and building Lower.com field would leave a corner open which can now be viewed by that rooftop patio.
Moving to the East Market, DeHays noted that building was the most difficult to get capital to renovate in the country that year. Using a combination of grants, state and federal tax credits and more, 13 different law firms combined to make the deal happen.
“This area hadn’t seen an investment of $15 million dollars since they did the addition of the hospital. In total, between this and across the street it’s $62 million dollars put into this market has a pretty big impact,” DeHays said. “This project took forever; it was us trying to figure out how we’re going to do this and not create a gentrification problem right in the middle of the neighborhood.”
Moving on to current projects Connect has in development. Connect had the Ohio Jobs and Family Services building, the Ohio Supreme Court and the Ohio Department of Education put on the National Registry of Historic Places and received a tax credit in 2023 of $7.1 million and another grant of over $5 million. It’s not public yet what will be in the buildings, but it will include a pool and rooftop space.
DeHays outlined what it will take to create the first ever modular apartment development inside a historic building. “We actually got the National Parks Service to allow us to use our modular factory inside of this building. We’re going to cut a bay, six stories tall out of the side of the entire building and we’re going to feed apartments into it,” DeHays said.
Next, DeHays outlined a new project in Marysville. When approached by the City of Columbus about redeveloping a lot that included a pond and creek, but wasn’t quite big enough, he negotiated in grain silos that were adjacent to the property. It did take an additional two years to gain access to the additional land. DeHays described the renderings of what the property will look like when complete, including a sports bar which is lacking in Marysville. The property will also include 264 modular apartments, a gym, a bridge and utilize the essence of the creek. In addition to modular apartments, DeHays is developing 11 townhomes with garages in the same vein as an experiment to see how it will work.
“This is the biggest thing we’ve been doing, for the past five and a half years we’ve created the largest modular apartment factory in the United States. We create our own product. We do a lot of steel framing, the process of steel framing, you can get your precision down. Machines can cut it, they can form it, they can bend it, they can punch it, in our factories we have machines from New Zealand, it took them two years to come in and six months to program and we have eight full-time engineers, our machines will run 4,000 metal feet an hour, we have three of them, we can run an entire wall section, an entire floor section, an entire ceiling section.” DeHays said.
There are several floor plans, from small one-bedrooms to larger one bedrooms, multiple modulars create different floor plans and the modules are sold out through 2027. “Right now, we’re doing two modulars a day in the factory, in 18 months we’ll be doing 10. We need to have projects that ready so that we can feed really quick,” DeHays said. “Just because we don’t have capacity now, that entire paradigm is going to flip because it’s a way for us to drive down costs.”
One thing that can be anticipated with modulars is overlap, noting that the price cannot be beat. The costs are 5-8 percent less in cost and 10 - 15 percent less in soft cost. The reason why is, the apartment complex, next year will be built in five months.
After taking a few questions from the audience, Swanson returned to thank everyone for attending and invite them to the Expo and upcoming events.
