How We Turn a $525K House Into a 140% Return: This Week's Six-Figure Infill Deal
If you've owned some rentals, maybe done a flip or two, and noticed the math just doesn't work like it used to — you're not imagining it. At today's rates, the BRRRR strategy hasn't been a viable strategy in Boise, at least at any real scale, for almost a decade. Flips are hard to find. Rentals need 30-40% down just to break even. Even apartment syndications are struggling right now.
So this week, on our live Friday call, I walked through the three ways we create value in our system — value that almost nobody else in this market knows how to find, let alone execute. Then I showed exactly how it plays out on a live deal we sent to our deal list investors and realtor partners that same day.
The Three Levers
1. We find land that's as close to free as possible.
We look for single homes sitting on lots large enough to subdivide. In the ideal deal, you're not paying anything extra for that oversized lot — you resell the existing house once it's split off, and the land underneath the new units effectively costs you the price of splitting it.
2. We entitle and develop the property to increase its value.
As long as it costs less to acquire, entitle, and develop a lot than what that finished lot is worth after sales costs, you've created value — the same forced-appreciation principle behind a flip, just applied to land.
3. We build better and cheaper than a typical builder can.
This is the lever most people miss entirely, and I'll get into why below.
This Week's Deal: Nine Cottages on Cloverdale Road
This one came to me off-market from a realtor who's followed my content for a few years. It's in South Boise on Cloverdale Road — close to town, close to the freeway, in the path of ongoing development to the south. She's planning to list it publicly in the next week or two, but for right now we've got a short exclusive window with it.
Here's what's on the table: an existing 3-bed, 1-bath house, 1,664 square feet, sitting on almost an acre. Current comps put it right around $500k-$525K — which is essentially what the seller is asking. Even after budgeting for a light cosmetic renovation (flooring, paint, some minor touch-ups), the cost basis for the extra land beyond what the house is already worth comes out to roughly $3,000 per lot. That's about as close to free land as you'll find.
The play: build nine 3-bed, 2-bath cottages on the property, each around 1,100-1,150 square feet on the MLS. All-in cost per house, including interest, lands around $325K. We feel confident these sell at $399K all day — a price point you basically don't see in new construction in Boise right now, where the average new-build price is pushing past $650K.
Each cottage gets a two-car garage — which is actually unique for this type of development. Boise only requires one parking space per cottage and doesn't require guest parking at all, but with no street parking available on this stretch of Cloverdale, we designed for full two-car garages on every unit plus five additional guest spaces. Most units also get private backyard space, which isn't a given on cottage developments — some of our other projects go with fully shared common yard space instead.
It's structured as a condo plat rather than a subdivision, which shaves roughly a year off the development timeline since it's an administrative approval rather than something that has to go through city council or planning and zoning. Owners will own their unit outright — like a normal condo — while the HOA owns the underlying acre, with each owner holding a share of it. We're structuring the HOA and ownership setup to keep every unit warrantable, so buyers can get FHA or conventional financing with as little as 3-5% down instead of getting boxed into the 10-20% down products that come with non-warrantable condos.
Why the Construction Side Is Where the Real Value Gets Made
This is the part most investors, and even most builders, don't fully appreciate.
If you hire a typical custom builder, you're not just paying for lack of scale — you're paying for the fact that there are roughly 200 decision points during a build, and if you haven't built multiple homes before, you're making most of those decisions on the fly. That creates delays. Delays cost interest. Interest eats profit.
We have 99% of decisions made before we ever break ground. Design elements, materials, layout — all locked in ahead of time and reconfirmed with walkthroughs, not decided mid-construction. That lets us move through the build fast once we start, and it's a big part of why our numbers work even at a modest scale of nine units.
The Numbers
Here's how it shakes out on this deal:
Profit per cottage: ~$44,000, across all 9 units
Loss on the existing house resale: ~$29,000 (sales costs on the original property, after an assumed 18-month hold and remodel/replat)
Capital required: ~$265,000 — buy the house with 30% down, pay entitlements out of pocket (no clean way to finance that stage), and construction lenders come in once the loan-to-value and loan-to-cost numbers work in their favor
Cash-on-cash return: 140% (a 2.4X return)
IRR: roughly 60%
And a lot of that capital comes back early — once the original house resells around month 18, you're down to about $100K left in the deal for the final stretch, and profit often starts flowing in with the first few unit sales, before the whole project is even sold out.
We also build in a profit guarantee on our deals up to $200,000 once we're through due diligence, because even in a market that isn't trending down, sale prices two years out are never guaranteed. We go in conservative on purpose.
Where to Go From Here
Every Friday at 2pm we break down whatever's the most interesting infill opportunity we've found that week — live, with real underwriting, not just theory. If you get value from these calls, don't just watch and disappear. Get on our list for the weekly Deal of the Week email, where you'll get first access to the best deal on the market that week before it goes wide, plus the link to register for upcoming calls.
And if you're not in a position to jump on a deal like this yourself but you've got friends or family who might be — send this their way. Sometimes the best way in is together.
