Developing apartments targeted at certain niches of the market – working class renters, students and seniors – can be highly challenging. Wood Partners has met those challenges and turned specialty housing into a key component of its overall business. Each year, affordable, student and age-restricted units account for approximately one quarter of Wood Partners’ development pipeline.

In the case of workforce apartments, creating an efficient financial structure is critical to the project’s success. Wood Partners has acquired an in-depth knowledge of the complex network of local, state and federal subsidies that are critical to sourcing the most advantageous capital and also understands how to communicate with our private lenders and equity partners in this regard. In some cases, the company has [even] used its expertise to help municipalities create their first subsidies designed to support local workforce housing.

In providing housing for students and seniors, understanding the dynamics of each market is paramount. The tastes and preferences of these renters are inordinately particular and vary – sometimes dramatically – based on everything from affluence to geography. Wood Partners never begins substantial pre-development until it understands the social, cultural, and supportive networks that our communities must be designed to fit within. This qualitative due diligence is combined with a thorough technical analysis of supply and demand drivers ensuring that we are building for a market or a consumer segment that is quantifiably underserved.

While workforce, student and age-restricted housing require particular expertise and some design details may be different, Wood Partners’ commitment to building communities of lasting value is unchanged. Our extensive portfolio of specialty housing communities exists as part of the same Wood Partners brand and is fundamentally constructed of the same top quality as all the multifamily apartments we’ve developed.