Elle McGhee and her husband Bernard, a general contractor, built a six-unit student housing project that's 90% complete and already fully rented. What started as a duplex plan expanded after they won three adjacent city lots. Bernard breaks down the essential team and process: civil engineer, architect, crew, plus banking, zoning, and coordination to keep everyone on track.
All right guys, so this is our latest project that we're currently working on. As you can see, it's still in the building process. We still have some finishing up to do, but guess what? It's already sold and it's already rented out to students as well, y'all. So we got about 10% left. I'm going to introduce my husband Bernard, our general contractor, and he'll tell you about this experience.
When I first seen this lot, the vision that I had for it, we was thinking about doing like a duplex. We did a duplex before, we had the right size on it. Weeks later, city put out for bid 3 lots. So we bidded on the lots, we won all 3 lots the city put out. So our vision changed. So once we had more square footage to build more units, then we converted into a 6-unit. Building a project like this, first you need to have your civil engineer, you need to have your architect, you know, just a team of guys, a crew that is reliable. They gonna show up every day, gonna go hard, the extra mile. Uh, someone that just, you know, wanna join, sign up, understand the process, understand the ups and downs about it, understand the banking, understand the funding behind it, understand dealing with the contractors, dealing with the payroll, dealing with planning and zoning, dealing with the civil engineer, and then dealing with people in general. No one's perfect, but it got to be someone that going behind making sure that everybody doing what they were hired to do.
