Annandale Mansion: The House That Kept Its People
When we first walked through Annandale Mansion, the pitch practically wrote itself: gorgeous bones, a great location near Skidmore, ten legacy tenants paying rents that hadn’t moved in what felt like a decade. The obvious playbook is the one everyone expects — empty the building, gut it, rebuild it, lease it up fresh.
We decided not to do that. The character of a building like this isn’t just in the crown molding and the old hardwoods, it’s in the people who’ve been living there, who chose this place over the newer, more generic options nearby. Clearing everyone out to move faster would have solved a scheduling problem and created a bigger one. So we built the project around keeping the tenant base in place and moving people unit by unit as construction progressed, rather than vacating and starting over.
Ahead of Schedule & Under Budget
By year-end we were 55% through construction — exteriors mostly restored, interiors about 45% underway, and four units fully turned over to property management. Three of those four leased right away, and what we were most glad to see was who leased them: existing legacy tenants transferring into the renovated units instead of leaving. Rents on those transfers jumped more than 50%, which told us the approach was working the way we’d hoped.
The other six legacy households stayed in place at their original rents, which kept cash flow steady while we worked around them. That part took patience — sequencing the construction so units could come offline and back online without disrupting people who were still living there day to day.
We were also running about $153K under budget at that point, mostly from the exterior restoration coming in cheaper than planned.
An End in Sight
By spring we’d reached 80% complete— common areas were fully finished and landscaping was wrapping up. This is where the “bring the character forward” idea really showed up — the lobbies, hallways, and shared spaces weren’t an afterthought behind the unit renovations, they were treated as central to what makes the building feel like itself.
Leasing was ahead of expectations, too: five units leased at an average of $1,845/month, with stabilized revenue tracking 7–10% above our original underwriting. We were still sitting on roughly $60K of favorable budget variance against the ~$4.81M total project cost.
Where do we stand today?
Construction is complete and we are 1 unit away from being 100% occupied. Every unit interior, every common area, every bit of landscaping was done, and the legacy resident transitions wrapped up alongside it — every household that wanted to stay through the renovation did. Final project cost landed at about $4.75M against the ~$4.81M budget, roughly $60K under.
We’re now in stabilization, watching operations settle in, and looking ahead to distributing tax credits in 2027 and evaluating whether a refinance makes sense down the line.
Why did this matter?
The faster version of this project would have meant vacating, renovating everything at once, and re-leasing to whoever showed up. Instead we asked a longtime tenant base to stick with us through a phased renovation, protected the income that came with keeping them, and used the extra time to get the shared spaces right. The result isn’t just good numbers — it’s that Annandale Mansion still feels like the building people chose to live in, just one they’re now paying a lot more to live in.
— The Green Springs Capital Group Team