The 18-City Skyscraper: How One Apartment Tower Design Got Cloned From Atlanta to Denver

Novare Group's exit from its last SkyHouse tower closes the book on a development program that treated the American high-rise apartment building like a manufactured product, not a building.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Market • 2026-06-29

In February 2026, Novare Group sold a 26-story apartment tower in Atlanta's Buckhead neighborhood for $83.4 million, and with that single transaction, a decade-long experiment in industrializing the American skyscraper quietly came to an end. The buyer, UBS Realty Investors, was simply the latest in a long line of institutional owners to take a piece of a brand that once defined a certain kind of Sun Belt apartment tower: glassy, amenity-heavy, and unmistakably the same building no matter which skyline it stood in. Between 2010 and the building of that final Buckhead tower in 2015, Novare and its partners had built 18 of these towers across the American South, Texas and Colorado, all bearing the same name, the same proportions, and in most respects the same set of architectural drawings. A renter signing a lease in Rainey Street in Austin was, without knowing it, moving into the same floor plan, the same slab thickness and the same rooftop pool deck as a renter eleven states away in Charlotte or Denver. What looked to most renters like just another luxury high-rise was, underneath, a manufacturing program disguised as real estate development, one that treated the skyscraper less as architecture and more as a part number to be reordered every time Novare picked a new city.

A Skyscraper With a SKU Number

The tower that sold, SkyHouse Buckhead, was not a one-off. It was the last of 18 buildings built under a single brand, by a single development team, using a single architectural design that got copied, with minor adjustments, from city to city for more than a decade. Atlanta-based Novare Group and its construction partner, Batson-Cook Development Co., built SkyHouse towers in 17 locations across 10 cities: Atlanta, Charlotte, Raleigh, Orlando, Tampa, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Houston and Denver. Each one cost between $45 million and $75 million to build. Each one stood between 23 and 25 stories tall. Each one held between 320 and 354 apartment units. And each one, structurally and architecturally, was the same building.

The prototype came from Atlanta architecture firm Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart & Associates, which drew up a standardized design: floor-to-ceiling glass in every unit, a parking structure detached from the residential tower, and a top-floor amenity deck with a pool, a club room and a fitness center, the feature that gave the brand its name. Novare's website describes the program plainly: the SkyHouse name refers to the location of the amenities on the top floor of the building. Once that design existed, the job for every subsequent city was not to design a new tower. It was to take the existing one and make it fit.

That job fell to Stanley D. Lindsey and Associates, the structural engineering firm responsible for adapting the SkyHouse prototype to a new site, a new soil profile and a new building code every time Novare picked a new city. According to a 2016 case study in AEC Magazine, the firm reused its 3D structural models for each location and pushed changes through Bentley Systems' RAM Structural System and RAM Concept software to model footings, frames and slabs quickly enough to keep pace with Novare's development schedule. The result, per the case study, was construction timelines cut by an estimated 12 weeks per building and costs reduced by roughly 25 percent compared with a from-scratch design. A separate account from Novare put the build time at 14 to 18 months per tower, at about 80 percent of the cost of conventional podium-style high-rise construction.

What Actually Changes From City to City

Stanley D. Lindsey's engineers were not simply pasting one design onto different ground. Three variables forced real changes at every site. Foundation systems had to be redesigned for differing soil conditions, using RAM Foundation for spread footings and isolated pile caps and RAM Concept for mat foundations where soil quality demanded it. Building codes differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and the firm's software suite updated automatically as new codes were adopted, letting the team check a design against local requirements without starting over. And wind and seismic loads vary significantly between a coastal Texas site and a site in the Rockies, requiring RAM Frame to recalculate lateral forces for each location.

What did not change was the architecture. SRSS's prototype called for a mostly cast-in-place concrete structure with a 7-inch, two-way post-tensioned concrete slab and concrete shear walls, and that core system carried over from Atlanta to Denver with only the dimensions and reinforcement adjusted for load. Reducing slab thickness across the portfolio, engineers found, cut concrete usage by 7 percent per building, savings that compounded across 17 towers.

The economics only worked because the upfront investment in the prototype was treated as a sunk cost to be amortized across the whole program, not absorbed by a single building. Once the architectural design, structural model and construction sequencing existed in reusable form, each additional tower could be designed and detailed at a fraction of the cost of an original project. Novare also kept the same general contractor, Batson-Cook Construction, and largely the same subcontractor relationships across markets, which meant that lessons learned building tower number four did not have to be relearned building tower number eleven.

The Architect Who Tried to Stop It

Not every city welcomed the formula quietly. When Novare announced plans in 2011 to bring the SkyHouse design to its own home market, the proposed tower for Midtown Atlanta drew an unusual form of protest: a rival design. Atlanta designer Kyle Benedict was unhappy enough with the look of the standardized building that he drafted an entirely different tower for the same site and offered to sell Novare the plans, asking for either a $75,000 lump payment or $20,000 plus a guaranteed rent-free unit in the building for 10 years. Novare ignored the offer and built the standard SkyHouse design anyway, the building that opened in 2013 as SkyHouse Midtown.

Benedict's protest captured a real tension in the program. SkyHouse was, by design, the same building wearing slightly different clothes: Novare confirmed to local press that the only meaningful variations between locations were small differences in color, height, ranging from 23 to 26 stories, and one of three rooftop profile options. In Houston, the company built two of them across the street from each other. The pattern fits squarely into what architecture critics and writers have more broadly described as the wave of sameness in new American apartment construction, a style some have nicknamed fast-casual architecture or developer modern for the way it treats buildings like products optimized for cost rather than designed for place. SkyHouse simply made that logic explicit, branding the repetition rather than disguising it.

Selling the Towers, One by One

The financial structure behind SkyHouse was as standardized as the architecture. According to Batson-Cook's own project records, the development partnership handled each tower's capital stack differently depending on the deal: some buildings were paired with an institutional partner seeking a long-term hold, while others were built, leased up and sold on the open market once stabilized. Both paths played out repeatedly across the portfolio.

Equity Residential, the publicly traded REIT, bought SkyHouse South in Midtown Atlanta for $115 million in 2021, a price of roughly $341,000 per unit that ranked among the most expensive multifamily sales in the city's history at the time. The Radco Companies bought SkyHouse Midtown for $131 million in 2022 and renamed it The M by Radius. CBRE Global Investors paid $190 million for the two-tower SkyHouse Uptown complex in Charlotte. Equity Residential also picked up SkyHouse Uptown in Denver. Each sale effectively cashed out one node of the program while the underlying design kept getting redeployed in the next city on Novare's list.

The Buckhead sale that closed out the program told the same story in miniature. Novare and its partners, Ackerman & Co., NGI Investments and Batson-Cook, completed the 362-unit tower in 2015 with construction and permanent financing from UBS Global Asset Management. A decade later, UBS Realty Investors bought the same building back from Novare for $83.4 million, or $230,387 per unit, a price that Fulton County's own assessment data shows came in below the building's $94 million valuation in 2020, reflecting the broader repricing that has hit Sun Belt multifamily assets since interest rates rose. Novare CEO Jim Borders called the sale a moment when the SkyHouse program has come full circle. It was also, more simply, the moment the company that invented the prototype stopped owning any of it.

What the Industrialized Tower Leaves Behind

SkyHouse is not the first attempt to treat housing like a manufactured product. But it is one of the clearest American examples of that logic applied to genuine skyscraper-scale construction rather than to suburban tract housing or low-rise garden apartments, and it produced results that are hard to argue with on pure economics: 17 towers, totaling thousands of units, delivered roughly 25 percent below the cost of bespoke design and detailed enough to satisfy 10 different sets of local building codes.

What it also produced was a skyline pattern. Drive between Midtown Atlanta, downtown Charlotte, Rainey Street in Austin and Uptown Denver, and the same building, with the same proportions, the same glass, the same top-floor pool deck, recurs in city after city, indistinguishable except for a paint color and a roofline detail. The towers have since scattered into different hands: a REIT here, an opportunistic investor there, an institutional fund somewhere else, each one now managed independently with no obligation to maintain whatever common identity the SkyHouse brand once implied. The design that made the buildings cheap to build is the same design that makes them difficult to tell apart, and with Novare's exit from Buckhead, the company that built that contradiction into 17 separate skylines no longer owns a single piece of it.