Why Cincinnati's Biggest Multifamily Deals Don't Pencil for Everyone

Lee Yoder holds 930 units, and almost none of them are near Cincinnati. Why institutional capital compresses returns above 100 units, and what he found in rural Ohio and Indiana instead.

About This Post

This analysis draws from a conversation with Lee Yoder, founder of Threefold REI, who has taken three multifamily syndications full cycle and currently holds 930 units concentrated in northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana. Yoder's experience straddling both a small Cincinnati-area portfolio and a much larger rural multifamily operation gives him an unusually direct comparison point on where returns are actually available at different deal sizes.

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. The full episode also covers Yoder's decision to bring property management in-house after years working with a third-party Cincinnati management company, and more detail on his rent roll and leasing performance in Williamsburg.

The Cincy REI Show publishes every Monday. New episodes cover neighborhood-level analysis, local investor strategies, and real deal stories from operators active in Greater Cincinnati.

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Why Yoder Left Cincinnati for Rural Ohio and Indiana

• Williamsburg, Ohio, in Clermont County, is Yoder's property closest to Cincinnati, roughly 15 minutes from the outer belt on Route 32 past Batavia. The appeal is straightforward: cheaper land and rent than closer-in submarkets, a small school district, a walkable downtown with a coffee shop and donut shop, and easy access back to every Cincinnati amenity via the outer belt. Two-thirds of the unit mix is one-bedroom, one-third two-bedroom. One-bedrooms moved from $850 back up to $900 in early 2026 after a rough stretch; two-bedrooms have held steady around $1,100.
• Northwest Ohio and northeast Indiana are where the bulk of Yoder's 930 units sit, in small towns like West Liberty, similar in character to Williamsburg but small enough that few investors outside a tight radius have heard of them. Yoder targets a minimum of 100 units per acquisition there specifically so the deal can support a dedicated on-the-ground team.
• Cincinnati inside the outer belt, particularly for properties over 100 units, is where Yoder says he consistently loses to institutional buyers who have a lower cost of capital and target lower returns, since their investors are largely preserving existing wealth rather than building it. Yoder still finds smaller Cincinnati deals with a workable price per door but says he has lost interest in that segment now that his fund size requires bigger acquisitions.
• The Cincinnati east side broadly, including the Eastgate area near Williamsburg, has seen heavy new apartment construction in the last several years. Yoder says that supply has occasionally pulled his own C-class tenants toward newer B-class product offerings with months of free rent as concessions, a pattern he expects to ease as those new deliveries slow into 2026 and 2027.

The Cap Rate Gap Between Cincinnati and Rural Multifamily

What's Working in Cincinnati (and Just Outside It)

Yoder's strategy comes down to a small number of deliberate choices about where to compete and how to hold.

1. Go where the big players aren't. Yoder specifically targets deal sizes and locations that fall below the threshold institutional capital requires, whether that means staying under 100 units in Cincinnati or going rural at scale further out.
2. Buy for cash flow, not a five-year flip. Yoder's earlier syndications targeted a shorter hold and exited faster than projected. His current portfolio is built around a 10-year hold horizon, planning to refinance around year five and return investor capital while continuing to collect cash flow rather than counting on a large sale-driven upside.
3. Bring property management in-house once you have the scale and expertise to do it. Yoder worked with a Cincinnati-based third-party management company for years, learned the business from them, and eventually built an internal team once he understood the operation well enough to run it with tighter focus and lower cost, since the internal team's only incentive is making the properties profitable, not generating a separate management fee.
4. Match capital investment to what the tenant base can actually pay. For C-class properties right now, Yoder deliberately avoids upgrading finishes like countertops or cabinets that are functional but dated, since C-class renters currently want affordability over upgrades they cannot pay for. Yoder's approach is to accept a lower rent, like $850 instead of $950, rather than force a renovation cost onto a tenant base that will not absorb it.

What is not working: assuming Cincinnati's headline market-wide rent growth numbers apply evenly across asset classes and unit types. Much of the reported growth is concentrated in single-family rentals and Class-A apartments, while Class-C one-bedrooms specifically have lagged or declined.

Lessons From the Field: What a Rent Leasing Platform Change Revealed About the Market

1. A leasing technology change can surface a market shift before broader data confirms it. TLP recognized the March shift within about three weeks specifically because they had already been tracking their own inquiry-to-lease funnel closely since 2023.
2. More inquiries do not guarantee more leases, at least not immediately. The gap between the January inquiry spike and the March conversion spike shows real demand and converted demand can move on different timelines.
3. AI leasing tools require real setup investment before they perform. Both operators described a genuine break-in period training the AI on quirks and edge cases before it delivered clean results.
4. Independent portfolios seeing the same shift at the same time is a stronger signal than either alone. TLP's Cincinnati experience and Yoder's rural Ohio and Indiana experience lined up almost to the week, despite having no shared management or geography.
5. Class-C recovery lags Class-A recovery, and the timing gap itself is data. Rents for older one-bedroom stock only began recovering roughly 18 months after the August 2024 downturn began, well after Class-A rents had already stabilized and climbed.