The Sustainability Project at Miami International Airport (MIA) is one of the largest energy performance contracts ever undertaken in Florida.
The $32 million project includes the installation of energy-efficient lighting, water conservation retrofits, air-conditioning and ventilation upgrades and other projects to optimize energy management with new technologies in airport energy efficiency.
The majority of new condo buyers in Miami have been looking to capitalize on their investments by flipping the units or renting them out, according to research by CraneSpotters.com.
Looking at the four largest condo towers completed in greater downtown Miami since construction resumed in 2011, anywhere from 45 percent to 96 percent of the units sold by the developers in each building were placed back on the market or put up for rent. That indicates a high level of investor ownership in those buildings, and also raises some questions.
With more than 18,100 condo units either under construction, planned with approvals or proposed in greater downtown Miami, according to CraneSpotters.com, is there enough rental demand at higher price points to support that many new units? And how will they be impacted by the nearly 7,800 apartments in the development pipeline?
The recently completed condo towers in Miami sold in the mid-$400s per square foot, but the average price per square foot for new projects is more than double that now, CraneSpotters.com principal Peter Zalewski said. When the sales prices climb, so must rents. Are there enough high-earning renters in Miami to fill those units?
“We strongly believe that when Brickell CityCentre opens and people will be able to walk to a shopping mall with a Saks Fifth Avenue, 11 cinemas and 500,000 square feet of retail, Brickell condos will raise in value and so will rents,” said Carlos Rosso, head of the Related Group’s condominium division. “Twenty-four-hour urban living close to the workplaces is and will continue to be in high demand.”
Here’s a look at how the four largest recently completed condo projects in Miami have performed:
NINE AT MARY BRICKELL VILLAGE
Units: 390
Units sold/price per square foot: 300 for $501
Active MLS listings/price per square foot: 17 for $469
Units resold: 0
Asking rentals/price per square foot: 95 for $2.78
Closed rentals/price per square foot: 23 for $2.47
1100 MILLECENTO RESIDENCES
Units: 382
Units sold/price per square foot: 376 for $435
Active MLS listings/price per square foot: 99 for $403
Units resold: 1
Asking rentals/price per square foot: 67 for $2.59
Closed rentals/price per square foot: 120 for $2.25
BRICKELLHOUSE
Units: 374
Units sold/price per square foot: 374 for $504
Active MLS listings/price per square foot: 91 for $627
Units resold: 7
Asking rentals/price per square foot: 64 for $3.63
Closed rentals/price per square foot: 77 for $3.24
MYBRICKELL
Units: 192
Units sold/price per square foot: 192 for $360
Active MLS listings/price per square foot: 31 for $379
Units resold: 8
Asking rentals/price per square foot: 19 for $2.67
Closed rentals/price per square foot: 126 for $2.01
It looks like some of these condo towers are more like apartment buildings. Projects in other South Florida cities have behaved quite differently. For instance, in Broward County’s largest newly completed condo tower:
BEACHWALK – HALLANDALE BEACH
Units: 300
Units sold/price per square foot: 289 for $448
Active MLS listing/price per square foot: 49 for $532
Units resold: 1
Asking rentals/price per square foot: 6 for $2.97
Closed rentals: 0
There’s a fair amount of resale activity, but not many rentals. However, Beachwalk has a rental pool system managed by the hotel management that doesn’t show up on MLS, so many unit owner participate in that. CraneSpotters.com also looked at the largest recently completed condominium in Palm Beach County, Bay Colony Juno Beach, and found only two of its 121 units on the rental market, although it had 23 resales.
For more on the South Florida condo market, see this week’s feature story with comments from the region’s leading condo experts. Most of them agree that sales are slowing.
Source: SFBJ
Property owners are proposing to extend Dade’s Urban Development Boundary westward with a massive new project.
The project would be called Green City, according to plans submitted last month. It could add about 26,000 new residents and thousands of new jobs near the edge of the Everglades.
Planned for the 859 acres include 11,401 homes, 1.36 million square feet of retail, 925,000 square feet of office, 350,000 square feet of industrial, 475,000 square feet of government and educational uses, and 660 hotel rooms.
Ownership of the property is controlled by several different entities who have combined for the application.
Extending development beyond the UDB is controversial due to concerns about sprawl and other environmental issues. Others, including the politically connected Jeff Soffer’s Turnberry Holdings have also been trying to move it. A supermajority vote is required by Dade’s commission.
View greencity on Scribd
Source: The Next Miami
Wealthy buyers from Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina have fueled a real-estate frenzy in Miami in recent years, sending luxury-condo prices soaring. Now, Miami developers and real-estate agents are setting their sights on a more distant part of the world: China.
A rendering of the Brickell Flatiron. Illustration: Brickell Flatiron
In April, representatives for several Miami condo buildings made the 8,000-mile-trip to the Beijing Luxury Property Show, a trade show that attracted more than 5,200 wealthy Chinese to look at international properties. Sales agents for the Fendi Chateau Residences, a luxury development going up near Florida’s Bal Harbour, handed out brochures in Mandarin for condos priced from $5 million to $22 million. Nearby was Lauren Marks, the marketing coordinator for two luxury-condo buildings: Palazzo Del Sol and the forthcoming Palazzo Della Luna, on Miami’s Fisher Island.
“I’m here on a fact-finding mission,” said Ms. Marks. “I’m trying to decide if this is the right place for us to facilitate a meaningful relationship with Chinese buyers.”
Executives of the Miami Association of Realtors, the largest local group of the National Association of Realtors, were there, too, handing out Miami market data and gold palm-tree pins attached to a card with the tagline, written in Chinese, “Enjoy the unique taste of life.”
Part of the reason for their journey: South American buyers, who comprise the largest foreign buying group in Miami, aren’t buying as rapidly anymore. A recent study by the Miami Downtown Development Authority found that sales of new condo units still under construction have slowed, in part because South American investors have less buying power, due to the increase of the U.S. dollar compared with South American currencies.
Meanwhile, Chinese buyers are beginning to take a closer look at the city.
“The Chinese are coming along very strong,” said Simon Henry, co-founder of Juwai.com, a China-based website that connects wealthy Chinese with overseas properties.“Miami looks relatively cheap compared with some of the big cities like San Francisco and New York.” Juwai says the average budget for Chinese buyers shopping for overseas properties on its site is $2.3 million.
Karen Xu, a Shanghai resident, is looking at one-bedroom condos in the U.S. as an investment. She says she didn’t consider Miami until she saw a marketing table at the Juwai Agent Summit in Shanghai in May for Brickell Flatiron, a downtown Miami development where one-bedroom condos cost $500,000 to $750,000. The deputy director of a boutique investment firm, Ms. Xu, age 35, was initially interested in a Manhattan home, but said she’s priced out. “Two to three years ago, prices were OK,” she said. “Now people are saying, ‘Buy in Brooklyn.’ I don’t want Brooklyn.”
Vanessa Grout, president of CMC Real Estate, which is developing Brickell Flatiron in downtown Miami, traveled to Shanghai in May to meet with investors and real-estate agents who could help connect her to Chinese buyers. Photo Credit: Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal
CMC Group, which is developing Brickell Flatiron, is marketing the property to the Chinese via local brokerages, says Vanessa Grout, CMC Real Estate president.
Currently, only 2% of international buyers in Miami come from China, according to the Miami Association of Realtors. But potential changes in Chinese investment policies, and the relatively strong Chinese yuan, are making the Chinese look like a good bet to Miami developers. The Chinese government is expected to begin raising annual limits on how much an individual can invest overseas from the current $50,000 cap—a rule often skirted.
Lauren Marks, marketing coordinator for Palazzo Del Sol and the forthcoming Palazzo Della Luna on Miami’s Fisher Island, attended the Beijing Luxury Property Show in April. She is shown here in the Palazzo Del Sol sales office. Photo Credit: Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal
Lauren Marks, marketing coordinator for Palazzo Del Sol and the forthcoming Palazzo Della Luna on Miami’s Fisher Island, attended the Beijing Luxury Property Show in April.
And Chinese buyers have become an increasingly dominant force in U.S. real estate overall. According to the National Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers recently surpassed Canadians as the top foreign buyers of homes in the U.S., purchasing $28.6 billion of properties in the 12-month period ending in March.
The Miami Association of Realtors forged a partnership with Soufun Holding’s Fang.com, one of China’s largest real-estate portals, several years ago. The relationship allows association members to offer special pricing to the website, said Teresa King Kinney, CEO of the Miami association.
One of the largest booths at the Beijing Luxury Property Show belonged to OneWorld Properties, which is marketing Paramount, a condo tower in downtown Miami with more than 500 units priced from about $650,000 to more than $6 million. Peggy Fucci, CEO of OneWorld Properties, says Miami’s luxurious image and thriving art and cultural scene appeal to Chinese buyers.
Still, there are plenty of challenges for Miami brokers trying to target the Chinese market. One of the most pressing issues is the lack of a direct flight from Beijing, Shanghai or Hong Kong to Miami.
“There were no direct flights to Hawaii until last year and up until that point foreign investment was almost nonexistent,” Mr. Henry said. “Now the Chinese are the second largest buyer there.” Spokesmen for American Airlines, which has a hub in Miami, and Cathay Pacific Airways, based in Hong Kong, both said there are currently no plans for new routes from greater China to Miami.
Ms. Grout, who spent a week in Shanghai in May, said it’s difficult to figure out what appeals to Chinese buyers, because there are many contradictions and not all buyers think alike.
During the Juwai summit, Ms. Grout said a Chinese real-estate agent asked her which direction the Brickell Flatiron units face. She told him they were east facing, toward the ocean. “He walked away right after I said that, saying facing east is bad for Feng Shui,” Ms. Grout said. “I had never heard that before.” (Feng Shui consultants say a south-facing unit is most preferable, to get ample sunshine, but a window facing east, for example, could create good energy for early birds.)
A rendering of the Fendi Chateau Residences in Miami. Agents for the development handed out brochures in Mandarin at the Beijing Luxury Property Show. —Venegas International Group
Monica Venegas, principal of the Miami-based real-estate firm Venegas International Group, has been coming to China property shows for the past seven years. “People finally recognize my face here,” Ms. Venegas said during LPS in Beijing. She added that she’s learned to be patient, as Chinese buyers rarely buy on the spot, and often are swayed by the advice of their friends.
Real-estate agents estimate that bringing a sales team and setting up a booth at a mainland property show can cost anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000—making it a pricey trip if a there’s no sales outcome. Aside from travel and accommodation costs, developers also must pay for translation services and shipping materials to China ahead of the show.
A few weeks after returning from Beijing and Hong Kong, Ms. Marks, of Palazzo Del Sol, said she hadn’t heard of any sales as a direct result of Miami developers attending the Beijing expo.
“I have a hunch our marketing dollars are going to be better served in Hong Kong with more intimate gatherings of ultra-high-net-worth individuals and less red tape,” said Ms. Marks, emphasizing that her development is looking for residents, not investors. “The only way to really grasp that was to go there and experience China in person.”
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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With 41.6 percent of its office space considered “green,” Miami ranked ninth of 30 markets on the 2015 Green Building Adoption Index, a joint project of CBRE Group, Inc. and Maastricht University.
For the purposes of this report, “green” office space is defined as holding either an EPA ENERGY STAR label, U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) full-building LEED certification or both. Using square feet as a measure, 41.6% of Miami’s office market is “green” – well above the national average of 38.7%. Moreover, Miami ranked particularly well in terms of number of buildings considered green – over 17%. By square feet, 21.84% of Miami’s office market has a LEED certification, and over a third of the office market is ENERGY STAR rated.
This is the second year in a row that Miami ranked ninth on the list, behind U.S. cities such as Minneapolis, which led the Green Building Adoption Index’s city ranking for the second consecutive year with 70.4 percent of all office space currently qualified as green (down from 77.0 percent in 2014.) San Francisco, again in second place, significantly closed the gap and now boasts a 70 percent green market, up from 67.2 percent in 2014. Chicago, at 63.4 percent, was third, while Atlanta (57.8 percent) and Houston (52.9 percent) swapped positions at fourth and fifth. The top 10 cities on the 2014 list all retained a place on the 2015 list.
The study also found that owners of small buildings have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by implementing energy-efficient practices, due to a significant gap between large and small office buildings in achieving sustainability certification. For example, 62.1 percent of office buildings in the U.S. greater than 500,000 square feet are considered green. In contrast, only 4.5 percent of all U.S. office buildings less than 100,000 square feet qualified as green.
“Our 2015 study confirmed that green building adoption has been primarily a big building, first-tier city phenomenon,” said David Pogue, CBRE’s global director of corporate responsibility. “It would appear that many smaller buildings in the majority of large markets still have an opportunity to be ‘best in class’ among their peer set by achieving these certifications.”
Executed in close collaboration with the USGBC and CBRE Research, this is the second release of the annual Green Building Adoption Index. Based on a rigorous methodology, the Index shows the growth of ENERGY STAR- and LEED-certified space for the 30 largest U.S. office markets, both in aggregate and in individual markets, over the previous 10 years.
Sources: CRE-sources
The 34-story Miami Center office tower downtown is set to undergo $20 million in renovations after main tenant Citigroup renewed its lease.
Cushman & Wakefield’s Jon Blunk represented landlord Crocker Partners in the lease, while NGKF’s Patrick Duffy represented Citigroup.
The banking giant will continue to occupy 125,000 square feet at the building, at 201 S. Biscayne Blvd., and will add a retail branch there. Citibank had $3.1 billion in deposits in that office as of June 30, 2014, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. – its most in Miami-Dade County
Crocker Partners said the $20 million in renovations to Miami Center will include a makeover of the lobby and exterior plaza, a new entrance with a valet, and elevator modernization. The tower totals 786,267 square feet.
“Locking in a long-term lease at today’s rental rates is a wise move,” Crocker Partners’ Angelo Bianco said. “Tenant demand from both organic and new tenant growth is in its fourth consecutive year of expansion. Couple that fact with the limited amount of office development in the pipeline and we have a perfect storm on the 12-to-24-month horizon for a significant increase in rents.”
Source: SFBJ
Lego is going green.
The toy company plans to invest $1 billion over the next 15 years as part of a broad effort to replace its iconic plastic building blocks with materials that are better for the environment. It will also make its packaging more sustainable.
The company made 60 billion Lego pieces last year. So a little bit of change could go a long way to “significantly reduce Lego’s impact on the planet,” Lego said in a statement.
Lego has already done things to reduce its carbon footprint — like cutting the size of packages and investing in wind power.
“Several factors influence the environmental sustainability of a material — the composition of the material, how it is sourced and what happens when the product reaches the end of its life,” CEO Jørgen Vig Knudstorp said.
This is not Lego’s first attempt to become cleaner.
In 2013, the company started a partnership with WWF, the environmental group, to help develop a plan for making its materials more sustainable.
Last October, Lego ended a 50-year relationship with Shell after falling under scrutiny over the oil giant’s drilling in the Arctic.
More than 100 new employees will be hired to work on the project at Lego’s sustainable material center in Denmark, which is expected to be finished by 2016.
Source: WPTV
While debate continues over a 10-acre development centered around a 633-foot LED tower, support is growing among some local entrepreneurs and tech investors for the Miami Innovation District proposed for the Park West section of downtown.
“I’m becoming pretty passionate about this project,” said Andres Moreno, executive chairman of Open English, a fast-growing online education company in Coconut Grove that has attracted $120 million in venture capital. “Miami is definitely coming together as an ecosystem but it is pretty spread out … We haven’t found a hub.”
Moreno is among the South Florida entrepreneurs, angel investors and board members of Endeavor Miami who have met with Innovation District developer Michael Simkins to discuss the project. Moreno, who also recently founded Next University, is among the more bullish: He said he would move his companies there.
National players may share his enthusiasm, according to Simkins, who said he is in active discussions with large tech companies as potential anchor tenants. Already lined up, Simkins said, is Silicon Valley’s 500 Startups, a well-known global venture fund for early-stage tech companies.
According to Simkins, the “verbal understanding” with 500 Startups calls for the organization to open an accelerator for top Latin American startups in one of the existing buildings on his property, possibly as early as this fall, with the goal of moving to a new tower when complete. Dave McClure, founder of 500 Startups, brought the company’s PreMoney Conference to Miami in March and said then he was looking at opportunities to expand to Miami. 500 Startups did not return calls seeking comment for this story.
A rendering of the Miami Innovation District project shows a street view of the public spaces and “cloud” layer, or elevated public space (Rendering provided by Innovate Development Group)
To be sure, Simkins and his Innovate Development Group have been promoting the benefits of clustering large tech companies, mid-sized companies, startups, incubators, co-working and public spaces, services and cafes in a common area wired with super high speed Internet access as a way to accelerate the growth of a tech ecosystem — an effort supported locally by the Knight Foundation and eMerge Americas, among others. Similar districts are found in Boston/Cambridge, New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Las Vegas and one emerging now in downtown Detroit, as well as London, Barcelona, Berlin, Stockholm, Medellin and many other cities, according to a 34-page Brookings Institution report. Many are in walkable-bikeable urban downtown-midtown areas close to public transportation and contain housing.
“The one thing Miami is lacking as a great city is the high-paying jobs that will allow us to evolve and elevate us overall. We visited innovation districts. We chose an architecture firm that has designed other innovation projects” — including recently Uber’s new headquarters, said Simkins, in an interview in his Miami Beach office.
He has not done a project of this scale before. Simkins’s proposal has faced a mountain of negative sentiment about the 633-foot centerpiece tower that would contain an observation deck, restaurants, retail, event space – and advertising in lights visible from the freeways. An electronic billboard in the sky is one of the nicer ways critics have described it.
Simkins prefers “a $250 million icon in the sky” and said the tower could also be used for public service messaging – a dashboard for the city if you will. But he is also quick to point out that the media tower, called the Miami Innovation Tower, is just one part of the vision for the live-work-play district, which includes nine towers with 7.4 million square feet – more than half of that earmarked for office space.
But it’s the overall concept, not the media tower, that interests the early tech supporters. What distinguishes successful innovation districts are big tech anchors. Juan Pablo Cappello, a lawyer and co-founder of the AGP angel network, said having a place – with literally the space – to house large companies is what excites him most about the Innovation District plan for Miami.
“If Miami can offer a place where enterprise tech companies like a Google, like a Facebook can have the space and resources to hire 100, 200, 500 people, that could be transformative,” Cappello said. “Companies like to cluster … With a project like this you can get some momentum building.”
Patrick McKenna, managing partner of HighRidge Global and an investor and entrepreneur who moved here a year ago from Silicon Valley, saw the power of momentum first hand. About six years ago, he said, San Francisco risked losing Twitter and other tech companies that were outgrowing their spaces. Meetings between the tech community and government ensued. Thanks to tax breaks and the rezoning of blighted sections of the city, the offices of Twitter, Square, Salesforce and Zynga lie within walking distance of one another. A district can attract both critical mass and tech anchor tenants, both critical to Miami’s tech development, he said.
Colombia-born entrepreneur Juan Franco, who moved to Miami from Silicon Valley about a decade ago to launch social gaming publisher Mentez and since has started three more companies, met Simkins through YPO, the Young Presidents Network. He, too, is a supporter of the project.
“What is missing here is an environment of entrepreneurs. That is what I like most about this project. … It will bring people together – young people with new ideas, people with experience, hopefully venture capitalists in the future. They are close together and that creates the interactions and the new ideas,” said Franco. Franco even likes the controversial tower: “I believe he Simkins needs to create a statement, that’s why I like the tower. It could be an icon of the city very related to technology and around the tower we can start to create that excitement.”
Moreno said he spent some time recently talking about the importance of frequent collisions – entrepreneur-speak for interactions that happen in tech clusters that Franco spoke about – during a visit with CEO Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos and engineer of Las Vegas’ innovation district. For Hsieh, moving his company headquarters and more than 2,000 employees there wasn’t enough. Hsieh also funded and led a resurgence of a once-blighted downtown area that now includes multiple big companies, startups, services, weekly speaker series, regular conferences, cafes, bars and a dog park.
Matt Haggman, Miami program director of the Knight Foundation, said he has talked with Simkins about the project in concept but has not seen the plans.
“I don’t know the details of the proposal, but our focus at Knight Foundation is to expand Miami’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, helping it become more diverse and broad-based. Any project that advances those goals would be good for the community,” Haggman said.
In the past three years, Knight Foundation has invested more than $10 million in Miami entrepreneurship programs.
Simkins plans to continue meeting with tech community leaders and wants to share plans and hear feedback at a future event by Refresh Miami, South Florida’s largest tech meet-up organization. He is also taking part in a panel discussion hosted by the Commercial Industrial Association about “Miami’s tech footprint” on Thursday. Moreno, a member of the Miami board of the global entrepreneurship nonprofit Endeavor, said a tech community advisory board is being formed for the Miami Innovation District project.
“The developer has spent a lot of time and money on what it will look like, but what will happen inside that venue is still to be defined. As a community, we still have an opportunity to shape this to be a really core part of the ecosystem. I think that is hugely exciting,” said Moreno.
Simkins, born and raised in Miami Beach, has become increasingly involved in the tech community and helped fund donations to various organizations and conferences, including Black Tech Week, Start-Up City: Miami, 500 Startups PreMoney Conference, Smart City Startups and eMerge Americas. About a year ago, he joined the AGP network, a group of angel investors, and has invested in six local startups.
He said his involvement and “brainstorming meetings” have helped shape features of the project, such as adding more community space. The plans by New York-based SHoP Architects, which also designed Uber’s new San Francisco headquarters, include a “cloud layer” – elevated public space with gardens and gathering places connecting all the towers. Also in the plans: parking lots near the I-95 exit so cars would be off the roads quickly to create a walk-bike culture, and 250- to 350-square-foot micro-unit apartments that would appeal to millenials. Nearly a third of the project – 2.4 million square feet – is earmarked for residential.
Though Simkins has already acquired the land needed, many political, legal and regulatory hurdles remain, particularly when it comes to the controversial media tower. Still, Simkins hopes to break ground next year. If that happens, he hopes to open the first buildings within three years and complete build out within seven. The developer said he is focusing first on securing a large anchor tenant. He then will move to middle-sized companies, startups, funding and support organizations in addition to 500 Startups, coworking spaces and university involvement. He’s also looking at ways to activate part of the property before construction, such as locating 500 Startups there.
Yet, the Miami Innovation District is just one piece of a much larger picture of Miami as a technology hub of the Americas, Simkins says.
“It is a component that is needed, along with a lot of the other things that are already taking shape,” he said. “But this provides the infrastructure … We need the enterprise companies that will bring the employees. That will keep the talent here.”
Panel Discussion
Michael Simkins
Miami Innovation District developer Michael Simkins is set to appear on a Thursday lunch panel titled “What is Miami’s Tech Footprint?” hosted by the Commercial Industrial Association of South Florida at Venture Hive in downtown Miami. Other panelists are Venture Hive founder Susan Amat, Pipeline founder Todd Oretsky and Peter Crovo, senior vice president of Prologis. For more information and to register for the event, CLICK HERE.
Source: Miami Herald
A Coral Springs urologist has revived his efforts to build an oceanfront eco-resort in Islamorada.
In May, Bert Vorstman submitted a downsized site plan for his 8.8-acre property, located at 83000 Old Highway. Islamorada Ecolodge, as the project is called, would have 49 units spread over a main lobby building and seven smaller villas. The lobby building would also house a restaurant, while a pool would sit next to one of the villas.
The plan is the first Vortsman has submitted since the Islamorada Village Council effectively rejected his proposal for a 70-unit hotel in July 2013. That plan garnered heavier than normal publicity for a project of its size, in part because of the many features put forward by Vorstman and his design team from the Fort Lauderdale-based EDSA planning firm.
Among other items, developers promised to rehabilitate a degraded wetland near the water’s edge, clean out exotic foliage from a hardwood hammock closer to the highway, and to re-vegetate the property’s sand berm. They also planned to build a water re-use system and to generate solar power onsite. The proposal, however, proved to be too ambitious, largely because no zoning district in the village allowed for 70 units on a site of that size.
This time around, Vorstman’s less grand proposal would meet the density rules of Islamorada existing Tourist Commercial zoning category, he said. However, the property would still have to be rezoned from its current status of Native Residential, which allows for no commercial development and just two homes on the property.
Vorstman said that during a June 5 meeting, Islamorada planners told him they would oppose the proposed zoning change. “I must say that I was absolutely floored, but they were not too understanding,” he told TRD.
Islamorada biologist Sandy Sprunt did not return calls to TRD. But a document obtained via a public records request appears to back Vorstman’s assertion that planners view the Ecolodge proposal with skepticism. Among the development policies that planners highlighted for emphasis were ones related to habitat fragmentation and the clearing of native vegetation.
Vortsman said the site is so heavily disturbed with exotic vegetation that it is not a working ecosystem. But in 2013 Sprunt disagreed, saying that the property’s ecosystem was not in decline.
Source: The Real Deal
An affiliate of Codina Partners obtained two big loans from Regions Bank to build its 2020 Salzedo mixed-use project in Coral Gables.
The bank (NYSE: RF) made a $53.54 million mortgage to Codina CG for the residential portion and a $15.35 million loan to Salzedo Office for the office portion. The site covers 1.6 acres at 2020 Salzedo Street.
Codina assembled the property with purchases of $5.2 million in 2010 and $977,500 in 2013 and then paid the owners of historical properties to transfer development rights to the property.
The project will have 213 apartments in 16 stories, 46,000 square feet of office in four stories, 5,000 square feet of retail and 559 parking spaces. The parking garage will have a rooftop amenity deck with a pool.
Source: SFBJ