The Cosgrove

The asset

The Cosgrove is a 36-unit community in Columbia, Tennessee, about an hour south of Nashville. It is a mixed-vintage property: 30 two-bedroom townhomes built in the 1970s and 6 three-bedroom units added in 2019. We acquired it in July 2021.

What we inherited

The property did not come to us stabilized. The third-party manager in place was not doing the job. Work orders went uncompleted. Units reported to us as leased were sitting empty. Evictions we were told had been filed had not been. Security deposits were not being collected. By the time we had the full picture, we were working through roughly $196,000 in damage.

Rather than swap one manager for another and hope, I took over operations directly. Within three months we had the property back to 95% occupancy on real, verified numbers, an honest rent roll in place of a reported one. That reset was the foundation for everything after it.

The business plan and execution

The plan was straightforward and the execution was not glamorous. We renovated every unit, investing $836,254 over the hold, roughly $23,200 per door. Renovated units let us re-base rents to what the market would actually pay rather than the legacy numbers on the old rent roll.

Underneath the renovation, we rebuilt the operations. We tracked physical occupancy, economic occupancy, and the pre-leased pipeline on every call rather than managing to one number. We tightened collections, tracking every promised payment date to a uniform filing threshold applied the same way to every resident. We held renewals steady rather than reflexively pushing increases, keeping paying residents in place. And we reset our financial review to audit-level, re-checking per-unit costs every month instead of accepting statements at face value after we caught inconsistent third-party accounting inflating costs elsewhere in the portfolio.

None of this was a straight line. Occupancy dipped during the heaviest renovation period as we turned units, then recovered. That is what a real value-add looks like on the ground: you take short-term occupancy pain to reposition the asset, then you stabilize it higher than where you started.

The results

Over the hold, average in-place rent grew from about $847 to about $1,425 a month, a 68% increase, on fully renovated units. Occupancy was restored to 97%, 35 of the 36 units, with the last vacancy pre-leased. The distressed, high-delinquency rent roll we inherited became a clean, current one a lender could underwrite.

In July 2026, the property refinanced into agency debt. It was purchased for $4,425,000 on $1.4 million of raised equity and appraised at $6,900,000, roughly $2,475,000 of value created through operations and capital improvements. The refinance returned 52% of investor capital while we retained full ownership of the asset. We refinanced rather than sold. This is a long-term hold, and the agency financing lets us keep operating the property for the years ahead. The refinance was not the strategy. It was the proof that the operational work had produced a genuinely financeable asset.

The takeaway

A refinance and an appraisal are lagging indicators. They follow the operations, not the other way around. The Cosgrove got there because of unglamorous, repeatable work: renovate every unit, re-base rents to reality, tighten collections to a uniform policy, keep the financials audit-clean, and let the building prove itself on the page before the lender ever sees it. That is the discipline we run across the portfolio.