Flexible, Robotic Housing for the Tech Workforce
Inside REthink Development: how REthink Development is turning the gap between hotel stays and long-term leases into robotic, extended-stay apartments built for three-to-nine-month stays.
Interview
Key Takeaways
Institutional capital is structurally too big for this deal, and that's the opportunity.
Private equity groups won't underwrite a check below $30M. Stage Right is raising just over $7M in LP equity against a $24M capitalization, a size that sits squarely in family office territory and out of reach for the funds that dominate multifamily.
Robotic micro-units flip the unit economics.
Ori's system costs about 5% more per unit to install, but generates roughly 50% more usable space. Smaller footprints also mean more units per building and higher rent per square foot, without paying to build bigger.
The model already has a proof point.
A sister project in Santa Clara hit 98% occupancy within six months of opening, half the time of the 12-month stabilization it was underwritten to. Furnished, flexible-term units leased first and command 1.7 times the rent of unfurnished units in the same building.
The location does the work a leasing platform usually has to.
Stage Right sits across from Culver City Hall, walking distance from Sony, Amazon Studios and Apple's expanding campus, with none of Los Angeles's rent control or mansion tax exposure. That location is why the 6.7% base case has room to run toward 7.4%.
The REthink Development Team
Steve and Greg Reitz have known each other since junior high in Manhattan Beach. Both spent time in software and tech startups before founding REthink together to focus on sustainable, placemaking-driven development in California, work they've now done for about 20 years. Steve also runs REthink's relationship with a larger institutional capital partner on the firm's bigger, 200-plus-unit projects.
Greg came up through the green building industry before co-founding REthink with Edwards. He now leads the operating and technology side of the firm's flexible-stay platform, including the remote leasing and digital turnover systems that make running a furnished, midterm-stay building at scale possible.