Why a multifamily developer builds in six Ohio markets

A development is priced by what it costs to build. Land, hard costs, soft costs, and the interest carried during construction set the rent the finished building has to reach before it covers its debt and clears its return on cost. Choosing a market is mostly a decision about what you will pay to put a building in the ground, and who will be there to lease it.

Metropolitan Holdings was founded in Columbus in 1998 and has built multifamily in the Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Toledo, and Akron markets since — over $800M worth, as published by the firm and current as of August 2026, and a measure of development volume rather than of investor return. This is about why those six; how the firm got there is its own story.

Ohio is not one market

“Ohio” is a line on a map, not a demand driver. The state contains several metros with genuinely different demand drivers, and a portfolio built across them is not the same as one concentrated in a single metro — the point our guide to Ohio multifamily investing starts from. Six of those metros are where we build.

So the useful question is never “why Ohio”. It is which metros, in what proportion, and what happens to the whole portfolio if the largest one has three bad years.

What separates one metro from another

Metros get compared on a short list of things that actually move a project, and a headline rent-growth figure is not one of them:

• The breadth of the employment base. Not how many jobs, but how many separate things a place does for a living. A metro whose payroll runs through one employer or one industry can be growing quickly and still be a concentrated bet.
• The submarket, not the metro. A building competes inside a three-mile ring, not a metropolitan statistical area. Metro-level demand says very little about whether the particular corner you have under contract leases.
• What else is being built in that ring. New apartments compete hardest with other new apartments, so what counts is how many units are permitted nearby and when they deliver. A pipeline that all lands in two quarters is a different risk from the same count spread over three years.
• How the jurisdiction treats density, and what it charges for it. Two cities twenty miles apart can hold opposite positions on height, parking ratios, and where multifamily is allowed at all. The fees, the public improvements required, and the utility capacity available are set just as locally, and land in the same budget as the lumber.

Against all four, the six markets are not one unit: different labour markets, different municipalities and counties, different pipelines of new supply. A project in Toledo is not exposed to a zoning change in Columbus or a delivery wave in Cincinnati.

Entry basis is the argument, not rent growth

What most determines whether a development works is what it is built at. Total project cost sets the rent the finished building has to reach, so a lower basis lowers that required rent. It does not raise the rent the market will pay. It lowers the rent the plan needs.

That is why the case for these markets does not rest on a forecast. A building underwritten to a rent its submarket already supports is a smaller bet than one underwritten to a rent that has to arrive later — the first can be checked against leases signed down the street, the second cannot be checked at all.

That is also how we underwrite. Our pro formas use untrended rents and set their assumptions at market, and rents at our communities are set at or below market. If a deal does not make sense at today’s rents, it is not good enough for us to build. It is a question worth putting to any sponsor, because the answer is checkable in a way a projected return is not.

Land and construction costs in these markets sit below the coastal metros, and the thesis we set out for advisors publishes that with its limit attached. The limit is the half that matters: a cheaper basis affects what a project is built at and does not by itself determine how it ends. It buys margin for error, not the removal of error.

What a few hours’ driving changes

A footprint of six markets within a few hours of each other means the same development and construction leadership can stand on every site, which is not available to a sponsor operating across several states.

A development has dozens of moments where the decision has to be made on what is physically in front of you rather than on what a report says. Subgrade conditions that do not match the geotechnical assumption. A leasing office on a Saturday in the second month of lease-up, which tells you more about pricing than the weekly report does. Someone with authority being present changes the decision that gets made and, more often, how fast.

It also means the people who underwrite a project build it and then operate it, rather than handing a finished asset to a third-party operator at the point where performance starts to matter. The services page sets out the rest.

Entitlement is local, and it is the long pole

A parcel of land is not a site until it is approved for what you intend to build on it. That usually means a rezoning or a planned-district application: planning staff review, a planning commission, frequently a council vote, often a public hearing, plus utility capacity, storm water, and traffic studies. Construction can be accelerated by paying for it. A planning commission’s calendar cannot.

This is where nearly thirty years in the same six markets does the work. Time in a market is a set of working relationships: with the land owners who decide whether a parcel comes to you first, the municipalities that approve the plan, and the trades that build it. What they buy is knowing early which approvals in a given jurisdiction are genuinely routine and which only look routine — the difference between an entitlement that clears on the first pass and one that goes back for a second hearing, settled before a dollar of equity is called.

Where the buildings are

The communities index lists each community with its address. More sit in Columbus than in any other city; the rest are spread across Huber Heights, Milford, Shaker Heights, Green, Maumee, and Perrysburg. That is a count of communities, not of units or dollars, each of which would give a different shape — but it is what the published record can say to the concentration question above: Columbus-weighted, with real presence elsewhere, rather than evenly spread.

Two of them carry no pin on the map: the geocoders return a confidently wrong answer for streets probably too new to be in the reference data, and a community with no pin beats a pin in the wrong town.

How to read a market figure a sponsor shows you

A geographic argument usually arrives with a market statistic attached. Four things decide whether it is worth anything.

• The publisher and the date. Not “recent data”, and not a footnote reading “internal analysis”. A named source and the quarter it covers. A figure that was true three years ago and is presented undated misleads even when no word in it is false.
• The exact geography. A metro-level number says almost nothing about the three-mile ring one building sits in. Ask for the submarket by name, and whether the building is inside it.
• What is being counted. Asking rents on new leases are not in-place rents across existing stock, and a number net of concessions is not the same number gross of them.
• Whether it appears in the offering documents. If a figure is load-bearing it should survive being written into a document that carries liability. Plenty of deck figures never make that trip.

Ask for all four. A number that cannot supply them is decoration.

What to ask an Ohio sponsor about geography

• What share of the portfolio, by project cost, sits in the largest metro, and what does the same question give by units?
• Which submarkets specifically? Not “Columbus”, but which part of it, and why that part.
• How far is the furthest active site from the office, and who from the leadership team stood on it this month?
• Is the basis advantage a feature of the market, or of when this particular parcel was tied up? Land contracted years ago is a good outcome, but it is not a market thesis and it does not repeat on demand.

The structural questions — how capital participates, the fees, the debt and when it has to be refinanced — sit alongside them, and the fund terms publish ours line by line.

What the geography does not settle

Geographic concentration is itself a risk. A regional employment shock, a change in one state’s tax treatment, or one metro’s supply cycle reaches most of a concentrated portfolio at once, and six metros inside one state is not a national footprint. A favourable basis lowers the rent a plan requires; it offers nothing against a budget that runs over, a lease-up that runs slow, or the rate available when short-term construction debt has to be replaced. Development capital is illiquid, no return is guaranteed, and investors may lose some or all of what they commit.

Geography settles nothing about structure or tax either. Whether capital participates as a lender or an owner, and what a development’s early deductions are worth to a particular investor, are separate questions: why new development produces large paper losses covers the tax mechanics, and the after-tax calculator shows what they do to a specific commitment.

For how the capital is structured around these markets, start with investing alongside us, or put the question to our team.