ETI Blog

A Contractor's Honest View of Which Amenities Move Rent and Which Ones Just Look Good on the Pro Forma

Most multifamily amenity dollars in Chicago get spent on the wrong things.

Not on the wrong spaces. On the wrong sizing, the wrong programming, the wrong assumptions about what residents actually do all day. I have walked through dozens of buildings where the 6am fitness room is overflowing and the 3,000 square foot lounge has one person on a laptop. Same building. Same operator. Same architect. Wildly different return on the same dollar.

This article is the contractor's view of where amenity money goes to work in Chicago multifamily, and where it goes to sit. It draws from years of multifamily construction across the city, and a clear pattern of which rehabs change resident behavior and which ones quietly disappoint.

Why So Much Amenity Money Gets Wasted

The reason is rarely taste. It is almost always process.

A development team visits a luxury tower in another market, falls for the amenity program, and asks the architect to copy it. The new building gets the same square footage with a different demographic. Or the brokerage team asks for amenities that look great in lease-up photography, with nobody running the operating math on the next thirty years. Or a designer pencils a 3,000 square foot lounge into early plans and no one wants to be the person to suggest cutting it in half.

Whatever the path, the building ends up with common areas sized for the renderings and not for the residents. Owners pay for it twice. Once to build it. Then every month for the life of the asset, in cleaning, programming, energy, and the rent that floor area never produces.

The Amenities That Actually Earn Their Square Footage

A handful of investments show up over and over in the buildings that operate well. They are not the most photogenic line items, which is part of why they often get underfunded. They are the ones residents notice every day, prospects judge the building by, and brokers point out on tours.

Lobbies are first, and it is not close. The lobby is the only common area every resident passes through every day, and it is the first impression for every prospect. A tired lobby quietly tells a prospect the rest of the building is also tired. The math on a strong lobby renovation, even at $250K to $400K depending on size, holds up across nearly every project we work on.

Fitness space comes next, with a caveat. The big-box treadmill room from 2010 does not move the meter anymore. What works is boutique-style space with quality equipment, room for stretching and functional training, and acoustic separation from the units above and beside. Done right, a fitness program retains tenants who would otherwise pay $200 a month for an outside gym. They stay because the building has what they need.

Package management is the third reliable winner, and it gets the least attention in design conversations. Amazon volume keeps climbing. Buildings that have not solved package storage are losing leases to buildings that have. The construction is unglamorous. Secure room, smart lockers, sometimes refrigerated lockers, clear signage. It works.

Work-from-home space is the newest entry on this list. The buildings adding small private call rooms, focus pods, and reservable conference space are seeing real demand. Hybrid work is not going away. Residents pick buildings that give them options outside their units.

Pet amenities get less ownership attention than they should. A pet wash station, a secure run, well-placed waste stations. The construction cost is modest. The retention impact in pet-heavy submarkets is real and shows up in renewal data.

The Amenities That Disappoint Most Often

Now the harder conversation.

Oversized lounges are at the top of the list. The 3,000 square foot social space with the designer kitchen photographs beautifully and almost never reaches the utilization the design assumed. Most residents who want to entertain do it in their units or off-property. The lounge sits empty for most of every day, costing the building cleaning, programming, and the opportunity cost of square footage that could have done more.

Theater rooms are right behind. They were a trend a decade ago. Residents stream what they want in their own units. The theater room gets booked for the occasional birthday party and otherwise sits dark. The acoustic build-out, the AV, the HVAC. All real cost, low return.

Game rooms with bowling lanes, golf simulators, and arcade equipment fall in the same bucket. The construction is expensive. The maintenance is ongoing. The utilization is concentrated in a handful of residents who would have stayed for less.

Pools in Chicago carry their own seasonal problem. Outdoor pools work for four months and cost real money the other eight in chemicals, insurance, staff, and capital maintenance. Owners with existing pools should keep them. Owners considering adding one should run the operating math very carefully before committing.

The Test Worth Applying

A useful filter when sizing any amenity space: would a resident actually use this enough to justify the square footage in the months it sits idle?

For a lobby, the answer is obviously yes. Every resident, every day. Fitness, yes for the residents who use it daily. Package room, yes for everyone. Work-from-home space, yes for the growing portion of residents who work from home.

For a theater room, the answer is harder. For a 3,000 square foot lounge, harder still. The honest answer is often that the building would have been better served with a smaller version of the same space, plus more square footage spent on the amenities that work.

What Strong Owners and PMs Are Doing Now

The operators getting this right share a few habits.

They audit utilization in their existing buildings. They walk at different times of day, count people in each space, and compare to the original design assumptions. The buildings where the data shows a gap get reprogrammed.

They reallocate square footage on the next renovation. If the lounge sits empty, the next capital cycle takes some of that space back. Maybe the fitness room expands. Maybe a row of work-from-home pods replaces a corner of the lounge. The building keeps adapting.

They ask different questions during early design. Not just how do we make this look great. They ask what the operating cost will be in year five and which amenities they can prove residents actually want.

Where the Construction Partner Comes In

Most of this is design and operations work. But construction experience matters more than ownership often realizes during the design phase. At ETI Construction, we see which amenities the next owner asks us to renovate after lease-up and which ones we never touch again. We see which spaces get reprogrammed two years in. We see which finishes survive multifamily use and which look beat after eighteen months.

Bringing that pattern into early design conversations protects the budget and the long-term performance of the asset. Owners benefit from seeing this before the design gets locked, not after they have already paid to build the wrong thing.

Building Float Into the Schedule

A schedule with no float is a schedule waiting to fail. Weather contingency, utility buffer, and realistic punch list durations should be part of the baseline, not optional add-ons applied after problems emerge.

Developers who insist on honest schedules from their contractors, and who accept that honest means longer but more reliable, tend to have better outcomes than those who push for the tightest possible timeline and absorb the consequences when reality asserts itself.

Final Thought

Amenity programs are operational systems, not interior design exercises. Every dollar spent either compounds into stronger NOI or sits there earning nothing for the life of the asset.

The owners and PMs winning this category in Chicago are willing to make hard calls about what residents actually use. The ones still building 3,000 square foot lounges nobody sits in are the ones whose rents soften first when the market gets tight.

The construction work follows the design. But the right construction partner can shape the design before it gets locked. That is where the real value lives.

Planning an Amenity Renovation?

ETI Construction works with Chicago property managers and developers on amenity space rehabs across multifamily portfolios. Our preconstruction team helps owners size, scope, and price amenity work that actually moves resident behavior.

Connect with ETI Construction to plan amenity work that pays back. Request a quote