In 2002, the Oakland Athletics went 103-59 with one of the lowest payrolls in baseball.
The success inspired Moneyball, which tells the story of GM Billy Beane and how he found value in undervalued players by leveraging data no one else was using. Even most non-baseball fans know Beane through Brad Pitt's portrayal in the film. Only a few, however, know about Theo Epstein and what happened next.
Epstein was 28 years old when he became General Manager of the Boston Red Sox. He was an analytics guy, just like Beane, but with one key advantage: the resources of a large-market team. In 2004, he led Boston to its first World Series win in 85 years. Then he did it again in 2007. And in 2016, when the Yankees were still debating how much to lean into the data, Epstein won once more as GM of the Chicago Cubs, ending a 108-year drought, the longest in MLB history.
The debate was over. Beane proved the model worked. Epstein proved it scales.
I have spent the last several years trying to prove the same thing in residential real estate. First as the head of brokerage at Charney Companies, and increasingly as an advisor to other owners who want to apply the same framework to their own portfolios.
And not because the analogy is clever, but because the problem is identical: an industry running on conventional wisdom, comfortable with incomplete data, and largely uninterested in asking whether the things it measures are actually the things that matter.
The edges are hiding in plain sight. You just have to go looking.
Win Shares
One of my favorite baseball books, Win Shares, asks a simple question at the end of every season: where did the wins actually come from? Not who played well, or what seemed to work. But which specific contributions, weighted and attributed, added up to the final result.
We apply the same framework to every project. Performance is measured across four core areas: leasing velocity, rent premium, retention, and operational efficiency. Win share is the percentage of total value created that we can attribute to a specific decision. We track this to evaluate what happened. More importantly, to improve how we approach the next one.
This piece covers five categories totaling 73 percent of win shares at Union Channel. The remaining 27 percent – leasing technology that doubled tour conversion, a resident experience program built around retention, and operations running 30 percent below comparable buildings – will be the subject of future pieces. The categories here are the ones that shaped the outcome before the building opened.
At Union Channel, the first of four interconnected buildings in our Gowanus Wharf campus, we leased up 25 percent faster than the competition and achieved rents 10 to 20 percent above market. What follows is the breakdown of how we got there.
Gowanus Wharf
As part of the Gowanus rezoning, Charney Companies began developing four residential buildings, later branded as Gowanus Wharf. The first project, Union Channel, delivered in February 2025.
Two major challenges shaped our approach. First, we were leasing in a neighborhood that had not yet proven itself as a residential destination. Second, we were launching alongside seven competing buildings (18 total in the pipeline) at roughly the same time, many backed by institutional developers with larger budgets and substantially more brand recognition.
We could not out-spend the problem. So we had to out-think it.
Leverage: 30% of Win Shares
Before we made any decisions, we pulled the architectural plans for every competing project in the market. From the drawings, we mapped unit mix, average square footage by unit type, and inferred amenity programs across the entire competitive set. We were looking for the gap between what the market was about to supply and what renters actually wanted.
That gap was readily apparent. Only about 3 percent of existing and upcoming supply consisted of three-bedroom units. When we analyzed broader demand signals for the neighborhood, we estimated absorption closer to 14 percent. That is not a rounding error. That is a structural mismatch hiding in data that every developer and brokerage in the market had access to. We more than tripled the percentage of three-bedrooms relative to supply and, sure enough, they were the first unit type to fully lease.
Studios told a different version of the same story. They were well supplied, but averaged around 500 square feet. Knowing the market was underwriting at roughly $85 per foot, we inferred that rents would open around $3,500 a month. So we designed our studios to 400 square feet: 20 percent more efficient than the market, but priced only 10 percent below on total rent. Better economics at a more competitive price point.
At Union Channel, our studios and three-bedrooms leased more than 50 percent faster than the rest of the building, pushing overall velocity roughly 12.5 percent ahead of prior projects. That acceleration reduced vacancy, pulled forward stabilization, and led to a faster refinance. The rent premium and velocity compounded into higher in-place NOI and ultimately drove about 10 percent more in refinance proceeds.
We calculate 30% of win shares, the largest of our categories, yet this area is often overlooked. Baseball made the same mistake for decades by prioritizing more accessible attributes like batting average or star power – the things that felt important – while ignoring the inputs that correlated more strongly to wins such as on base percentage. Real estate is no different. Owners tend to focus on the visible layers such as headline rents or absorption.
That's where the edge is.
Layouts: 25% of Win Shares
We run the same kind of analysis on layouts themselves. The findings are less intuitive than the unit mix work, which makes them more valuable.
Most prospective renters cannot tell you what they are paying for when they stand in an apartment they love. While it’s true that renter decisions are predominantly influenced by location, size, and price, there are still levers at our disposal. As a developer, we can't change the location but we can make an apartment feel bigger than it is.
What renters respond to, without knowing it, is the size of the living room. Of all the layout variables we have tested across hundreds of units, living room width is the single strongest predictor of rent per square foot.
Width is what lets two people sit across from each other without the furniture feeling apologetic. It is what makes a couch look like a choice rather than a compromise. It also allows for more windows and better light, features that are genuinely hard to quantify but that renters feel immediately, even if they can't articulate why.
Once we understood this, it changed how we design from the inside out – bar depths, kitchen configurations, circulation. We prioritize the variables that produce that feeling, not anecdotal data. Couple that with eliminating floor plan inefficiencies and the result is units that rent above their comps and feel worth it to the people living in them.
The 25% win shares come from the rent lift above what comparable units in the market achieved.
Amenities: 5% of Win Shares
We spent significant time studying amenities before Union Channel, and the most useful thing we learned was how wrong the conventional wisdom is.
The industry assumption is that more amenities signal more value. What our research showed is that renters don't think that way. They are not comparing checklists. They are seeking core amenities they can see themselves using regularly. In our correlation studies, quality of select amenities consistently outperformed breadth of amenity programs and, of every amenity type, fitness center quality had by far the strongest individual relationship with rent per square foot.
Uniqueness matters too. Developers often look at their comps and ensure they include amenities they’re seeing in that market. The problem is that if you build the same amenity package as everyone else, you simply compete on price.
We debated two amenity decisions at Union Channel. The first was how to design the gym. Many developers lay out their gyms in-house. Instead, we hired The Wright Fit, a specialist gym consultant. The result: three squat racks (an industry anomaly), top-tier equipment, and a layout that maximized the space. It sounds like a small decision. Our data says it isn't. A compelling gym is a reason to pay more in rent.
The second debate was whether to allow residents access to amenities across all of our Gowanus Wharf properties. Ultimately, we leaned in and it became a major part of our narrative when leasing Union Channel. Residents will eventually have access to 4 properties which include a basketball court, spa and sauna, rooftop pool, and rooftop mini golf.
While it’s harder to measure, we conducted resident surveys in which 9% of respondents specifically referenced either the amenity campus or the gym as a primary reason they chose the building. Based on this number, we determined that these decisions led to an additional 15 leases we wouldn’t have otherwise signed in the heat of the lease up. The compound effect on NOI and refinancing suggests a 5% impact on value created above baseline.
Brand Building: 8% of Win Shares
I was at dinner months ago with an executive from a top institution who told me that branding doesn’t move rents, markets do.
It’s the same instinct baseball had before Moneyball, if you can’t measure it, it must not matter. And yet, 20% of our leases came directly from social media, more than 4 times what we observed in previous projects.
We got there by hiring an agency that had never worked on a real estate project. That wasn’t accidental. The logic was simple: if we wanted to stand out, starting with the same creative playbook as our competitors wasn't going to get us there. We needed a perspective not already shaped by how the industry markets itself.
What emerged was a strategy built around the neighborhood rather than the building. We commissioned murals on our construction fencing in partnership with Arts Gowanus and later provided them with retail space to run pop-up exhibitions in the building. We interviewed local artists, business owners, creatives, and community leaders and featured them on our platforms. Before Union Channel had a single finished unit, it had over 3,000 organic followers on instagram.
What was even more telling was the conversion rate difference of these leads. They were nearly 2x higher than those coming through traditional listing portals. We made the building matter before it existed and, by the time we opened, these renters weren’t shopping, they were confirming.
It's also worth saying that brand compounds. A strong brand makes the leasing team more effective, the resident experience more resonant, and the renewal conversation easier. However, looking exclusively at the 15% bump in leases relative to prior projects, we can trace 25 additional leases back to branding alone.
This accounts for 8 percent of win shares here, but its fingerprints are on every other category.
Marketing Optimization: 5% of Win Shares
Five additional leases. That is what changing a cover photo was worth.
It sounds almost too small to take seriously. But that’s the point.
On our listings, we ran controlled A/B tests across different cover images: architectural renderings, finished units, amenity shots, lifestyle photography. What we found was that the right cover photo for each unit type consistently drove more clicks, more tours, and more signed leases. Our rooftop pool rendering produced the highest overall engagement. But it was the lower priced units that converted better from lifestyle imagery while our higher-end units responded better to interior photography. Applied systematically across every listing, the lift added up to ten percent more leads and five leases we would not otherwise have had.
In another favorite book of mine, Baseball Between the Numbers, the authors argue that teams can add roughly five wins per season simply by making smarter in-season decisions without changing their rosters at all. Same players, better decisions, more wins.
That's exactly what marketing optimization is. We didn't build something new. We paid closer attention to what we already had, ran the tests instead of going with our gut, and let the data tell us where those wins were hiding.
We applied the same approach across all of our digital marketing and the results totalled 14 additional leases, translating to 5% win shares for the category.
The Takeaway
The Yankees won 26 World Series titles through 2000. Since then, just one. They didn't get worse. But while the game evolved, they held on to an old model while everything around them changed.
The parallel seems obvious. Institutional multifamily developers are not bad operators. Many are excellent. Many are even innovating and analyzing data with teams larger than our entire company. Yet, the decisions that drove our success at Union Channel are not inherently complex. They were simply the result of looking at the same information everyone else had and asking a different question: what drives the outcome?
Billy Beane didn't win because he had more resources. He won because he saw the game differently. The opportunity in real estate is exactly the same, and most of the market still isn't looking in the right places.
I work with multifamily owners and developers who want to apply this framework to their own assets – across leasing strategy, operations, and asset positioning. If that's a conversation worth having, get in touch
