When you are at a new hotel or multifamily building, look at the elevators or elevator ask the question quietly: how many elevator(s) are here? In a growing number of new builds, the answer is one. Three or five stories of guestrooms or apartments, sometimes six, served by a single hoistway and a single machine.
We see this repeatedly. Owners walk us through stabilized assets and ask how a building of this size ended up with no redundancy. The answer is not a conspiracy. It is not negligence on the architect’s side. It is the predictable output of a building code that allows it, a developer pro forma that rewards it, and a lender environment that does not push back. The savings get captured at construction. The costs get distributed across the next thirty years of ownership.
This piece walks through how the math works, what the owner inherits after the developer exits, and where the same logic is now starting to show up in building types that should know better. Our perspective here is the building owner and asset manager, not the developer. Once the keys change hands, the consequences live with you.
What Does the Building Code Actually Require for Elevators in New Hotels and Apartments?
Less than most owners assume. Under the International Building Code, as adopted in most jurisdictions, a hotel or multifamily building of four or more stories generally requires one accessible passenger elevator to serve the upper floors. Buildings above the high-rise threshold, often seventy-five feet above the lowest level of fire department access, trigger additional requirements such as a fire service access elevator. Below that threshold, one elevator is frequently sufficient to satisfy code.
Code is a floor, not a ceiling. The minimum was written to address safety and accessibility, not operational reliability, guest experience, or asset value. A building can meet code with a single elevator and still create operational problems the day a passenger gets stuck, a control board fails, or a routine service call takes the only car out of service for a half day.
Local codes vary, and the authority having jurisdiction may impose requirements beyond the code. We are not interpreting code here. We are pointing out that “code allows it” and “the building is well-served by it” are not the same statement.
Why Does the Developer Pro Forma Reward Building With Only One Elevator?
Because a second elevator costs real money up front and produces no revenue line on the rent roll. Vertical transportation is one of the few major building systems that the developer can size down without affecting the count of rentable rooms or units, which is what the pro forma ultimately rewards.
The savings are not trivial. A second hoistway consumes square footage on every floor, square footage that would otherwise be a guestroom, a unit, a corridor extension, or rentable common area. The second machine, controller, cab, and door package adds equipment and installation cost. The second shaft adds structural and fire-rated construction. Add it up across a five-story building and the delta between a one-elevator and two-elevator design can run into seven figures on a mid-size project, before considering the lost rentable area.
Now apply a capitalization rate. Every dollar of recurring net operating income capitalized at a market cap rate produces several dollars of building value at sale. A developer who saves construction cost and captures additional rentable area is increasing the value of the asset at exit. The lender underwriting the construction loan rarely requires a second elevator if the code does not. The appraiser comping the project against similar properties is looking at projects built the same way. Nothing in the financing stack pushes back.
This is not a moral failing of developers. It is a rational response to the incentive structure they operate within. The system rewards going to the minimum. The owner who buys the stabilized asset, or who built it intending to hold, lives with what that minimum produced.
What Costs Does the Owner Inherit When the Building Has Only One Elevator?
The cost ledger is long, and most of it does not appear in the original budget. We see five categories repeatedly.
The first is zero redundancy.
When the single elevator is out of service, the building is fully out of vertical transportation service. Routine maintenance visits, code testing, callbacks, and modernization projects all become events that affect the entire building rather than half of it. A two-elevator building keeps moving when one is down. A one-elevator building does not move at all.
The second is a captive position with the service provider.
Service contracts are easier to negotiate when the building has options. A single elevator from a particular manufacturer, with proprietary controls and parts, narrows the field of providers who can credibly bid the contract. The owner who tries to put the contract out for competitive bid often finds that fewer providers respond, the responses come back closer to the incumbent’s number, and the leverage that should exist in a competitive market is not there.
The third is the guest and tenant experience cost.
In a hotel, an elevator outage during check-in or breakfast service does not stay quiet. It shows up in guest service scores, in compensation demands, and eventually in revenue per available room. In multifamily, it shows up in tenant complaints, online reviews, and renewal hesitation. These costs are real even when they do not appear on an operating statement under a clean line item.
The fourth is accessibility exposure.
The Americans with Disabilities Act and applicable state accessibility codes obligate the owner to provide accessible access. When the only elevator is out of service, residents and guests who depend on it for accessibility have no alternative. Each extended outage is a discrete event that an owner may need to address through accommodation, communication, and in some cases formal response. The single-elevator configuration concentrates that exposure rather than distributing it.
The fifth is refinancing and insurance friction.
Lenders and insurers are starting to pay closer attention to building system risk. An asset with a documented history of outages, complaints, and accessibility events on a single elevator can affect refinance terms, insurance pricing, and reserve requirements. None of this was contemplated in the developer pro forma.
How Does the Single-Elevator Problem Play Out Differently in Hotels Versus Multifamily Buildings?
The underlying issue is the same. The pressure points are different.
In a hotel, the elevator is part of the guest experience product. Guests interact with it on arrival, at every meal, every trip to the gym, and every departure. A single elevator in a one-hundred-fifty-room hotel creates a daily congestion problem at peak hours even when the equipment is running well. When it is out of service, the operational disruption is immediate and visible. Front desk staff manage complaints in real time. Brand standards in some flags include uptime and service expectations the property may not be equipped to meet with a single car. The general manager absorbs the consequence without a structural fix available.
In multifamily, the rhythm is different but the exposure is comparable. Tenants are not present for one or two nights. They live in the building. An elevator outage during a move-in, on a Saturday when residents are running errands, or during a delivery cycle creates a category of complaint that follows the asset through every renewal conversation and every online review. Multifamily owners often inherit a single elevator on a building that is one or two stories below the threshold where a second elevator would have been more clearly warranted, and the daily friction sits with the property management team.
The retention math also differs. Hotel guests are transient. Multifamily tenants who experience repeated outages are evaluating whether to renew. Lease-up on new multifamily product is sensitive to the early reviews, and a single-elevator building that experiences outages during initial lease-up can absorb a delay in stabilization that takes years to recover from.
A Note on Medical Office Buildings, Hospitals, and Other Healthcare Settings
The calculus changes in healthcare, but not always as much as it should. Hospitals carry life-safety and patient transport requirements that drive multiple elevators by default. The risk in healthcare is not typically a single passenger elevator. It is the medical office building or outpatient facility that imports the multifamily and hotel logic and underbuilds for the patient population it serves.
We see this most often in medical office buildings of four to six stories that were value-engineered during design. They satisfy code with a single passenger elevator and a small service elevator, or in some cases a single elevator serving all functions. When the building is leased to specialties that serve patients with mobility limitations, infusion patients, or imaging volume that depends on patient transport, the single-elevator configuration creates a clinical and operational problem that the building was never designed to absorb.
The relevant question for healthcare owners is not whether the building meets code. It is whether the elevator configuration matches the actual patient mix and the care delivery model the tenants are operating under. Those two questions get asked too late if no one asks them at the pro forma stage.
What Can an Owner Do When the Single-Elevator Design Is Already in Place?
The configuration cannot be undone without a major capital project, and adding an elevator to an existing building is rarely economic. What can be addressed is everything that surrounds the equipment.
The service contract is the first place to look. Response time commitments in standard commercial contracts are inadequate for a single-elevator building because every outage is a total outage. Same-day response within an hour for any outage, defined escalation protocols, and uptime accountability provisions are reasonable to request and possible to negotiate. Most contracts we review for single-elevator buildings do not include them.
Parts availability deserves direct attention. The owner of a single-elevator building is more exposed to lead time than the owner of a two-elevator building because there is no backup car. An independent elevator parts and components assessment on a fifteen-year-old single-elevator system can surface obsolescence risk before a failure makes it urgent.
Modernization planning needs to begin earlier. A single-elevator modernization is a major operational event. It needs to be scheduled with full coordination across operations, guest services or property management, accessibility accommodation, and tenant or guest communication.
The outage protocol needs to be written, documented, and practiced. Staff should know what to do when the elevator goes down. Residents, guests, and accessibility-dependent occupants should have a documented accommodation procedure. Regulators, insurers, and lenders increasingly expect that documentation to exist.
Frequently Asked Questions: Single-Elevator New Construction
Is it legal to build a hotel or apartment building with only one elevator?
In many jurisdictions, yes, provided the building is below the high-rise threshold and the single elevator meets accessibility requirements. The model building code generally requires one accessible elevator for upper-floor service in mid-rise hotels and multifamily. Local codes vary, and the authority having jurisdiction is the binding interpreter. Code permitting the configuration does not mean the configuration is well-suited to the building’s operational requirements.
Why do developers build with one elevator if it creates problems later?
Because the savings are captured at construction, and the costs are absorbed by the long-term owner. A second elevator consumes square footage that would otherwise be rentable, adds equipment and construction cost, and produces no direct revenue. The developer pro forma rewards the smaller footprint. The owner inherits the operational consequences after stabilization or sale.
What is the biggest operational risk of a single-elevator building?
Total loss of vertical transportation during any outage. Routine maintenance, callbacks, code testing, and modernization all become events that affect the entire building rather than half of it. A two-elevator building keeps moving when one car is out. A single-elevator building does not move at all, and every minute of downtime affects every upper-floor occupant.
Does a single-elevator building create Americans with Disabilities Act exposure?
It concentrates it. The Americans with Disabilities Act and applicable state accessibility codes require the building to provide accessible access. When the only elevator is out of service, residents, guests, and visitors who depend on accessibility have no alternative within the building. Each outage is a discrete accessibility event that the owner may need to address through accommodation, documentation, and communication.
What should I do if I am about to buy or finance a single-elevator building?
Conduct an independent elevator program assessment before closing. Evaluate the service contract, the maintenance history, the equipment condition, the parts availability picture, and the outage history. Build the cost of contract upgrades, potential modernization timing, and elevated reserves into the acquisition or refinance model. The single-elevator configuration is not a deal-killer. It is a feature of the asset that needs to be priced correctly.
Are there building types where a single elevator is acceptable?
Smaller buildings with modest occupancy, low daily traffic, and no significant accessibility-dependent population may be reasonably served by a single elevator with strong oversight. The question is fit, not configuration. A building that meets code with one elevator and serves its population well is operating within its design. A building that meets code with one elevator and fails its population repeatedly is not.
Key Takeaways for Owners and Asset Managers
The single-elevator building is not the result of anyone doing anything wrong. It is the predictable result of a code that permits it, a pro forma that rewards it, and a financing environment that does not push back. The savings get captured by the developer. The costs get inherited by the long-term owner.
For owners with single-elevator assets already in the portfolio, the answer is not to undo the configuration. It is to tighten everything around it. Contract terms, parts planning, modernization timing, outage protocols, and documented accessibility accommodation procedures all matter more in a single-elevator building than in a multi-elevator one. For owners and asset managers evaluating new acquisitions or new development, the single-elevator question deserves direct attention at the pro forma stage, not after closing.
If your portfolio plans to includes a single-elevator hotel, multifamily building, or medical office property and you would like an independent review of the situation we are available to discuss what options you may have. If you already have a single elevator building with concerns feel free to contact TEC to discuss.
This content is educational and is intended to help building owners and property managers understand elevator management best practices. It does not constitute legal advice, engineering analysis, or a substitute for an independent on-site assessment by a qualified elevator consulting firm.