Most cabinet suppliers are built for a single pull date. Multifamily lease-up does not work that way, and the mismatch costs developers real money in storage fees, damaged units, and supplier pressure to accept delivery before the site is ready.
The actual shape of a lease-up schedule
A 250-unit build-to-rent community does not open all at once. A typical phased delivery might look like 60 units in month one, 80 in month three, 60 in month five, and the remaining 50 as the final building comes online. The cabinet order is a single SKU count on paper, but the physical need is spread across 12 to 18 months of sequential building completions.
Suppliers that operate on one-time order logic will quote the full 250-unit count, set a single ship date, and expect the developer to absorb the product. That means on-site storage for 190 units worth of cabinetry the day you only need 60, with the associated risk of moisture damage, forklift damage, and theft. At $1,800 to $2,400 per unit in cabinet cost, staging 190 idle units represents $340,000 to $455,000 sitting on the ground before a single lease is signed.
What Project Stock actually does
Project Stock is the Cabo Pro Program’s inventory reservation structure for multifamily accounts. It holds your full unit count in our warehouse against a single purchase commitment, then releases product in pull increments that match your lease-up schedule.
The mechanics are direct. You commit to the full project volume, typically 50 units minimum to qualify, and we assign that inventory to your account at the locked price. From there, you call pulls as buildings come ready. Standard pull lead time inside Project Stock is 5 to 7 business days. You are not reordering from scratch each time. You are drawing down a reserved position.
This structure solves three distinct problems that come up in phased lease-up work:
- Price exposure. Cabinet pricing moves with materials. A 250-unit project that takes 14 months to fully deliver can absorb two or three price adjustments from a supplier who quotes per-pull. Project Stock locks your price at commitment, not at each pull date.
- Lead time uncertainty. A one-time supplier filling a 60-unit reorder in month three is competing with their full order queue. Your phase-two pull is not prioritized. Reserved inventory ships on your schedule, not theirs.
- Storage cost. Pulling to your build schedule means product arrives 5 to 7 days before installation, not 90 days before. At $8 to $14 per pallet per day in commercial storage, a 190-unit overpull carries real carrying costs over a multi-month timeline.
How to structure the commitment conversation with ownership
The objection that comes up most often is that ownership does not want to commit to full-project volume before all buildings are funded or permitted. That is a real constraint. Project Stock accommodates a building-by-building reservation structure for projects where phased permitting is the norm. You reserve Building A inventory on permit, Building B on construction start, and so on. The price lock applies within each reservation tranche, and pulls still move on the 5 to 7 day window once inventory is assigned.
For operators managing a multi-property portfolio, the same logic extends across projects. If you have three communities at different stages of lease-up, Project Stock accounts can be structured to hold inventory across all three under a single program agreement. Pull scheduling then becomes a coordination function, not a series of separate supplier negotiations.
The number that matters at the end
Phased cabinet delivery is not a logistics preference. It is a cost control decision. The difference between a supplier built for one-time orders and a program built for lease-up patterns shows up in storage bills, damaged product write-offs, and the time a project manager spends chasing reorder lead times instead of closing out punch lists. On a 200-unit-plus community, that difference typically runs $15,000 to $40,000 in avoidable cost over the full lease-up window, depending on how spread out the phases are and what the local storage market looks like.
The program is built for operators working at this scale, not for one-time buyers.
Details on pull minimums, reservation structures, and pricing tiers for phased multifamily projects are at cabocabinetgroup.com/cabo-pro.