Tag Archive for: apartment construction

Four Acres In Downtown Fort Lauderdale Up For Grabs, Bids To Start At $52M

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The state of Florida wants to sell a downtown office building and an off-site parking lot for more than $52 million.

The properties total 4.33 acres and includes the five-story Robert Hayes Gore State Office Building, at 201 W. Broward Blvd., and the 29,185-square-foot parking lot across the street.

David Wigoda and Lee Ann Korst, both senior VPs with the CBRE Group, will market the property on behalf of the state. They will accept sealed bids for the properties until Oct. 25 at noon.

Built in 1979, the Robert Hayes Gore building is 113,710 square feet on a 3.66-acre parcel. It houses offices for the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice; the Department of Children and Families and Adult Protected Services; the Department of Management Services; and the Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations.

The properties are nearby Brightline’s Fort Lauderdale station, the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, the Museum of Discovery & Science, and the Nova Southeastern University Art Museum of Fort Lauderdale. They’re also zoned as a downtown regional activity center, which is “one of the most open zoning designations in Fort Lauderdale, CBRE added in its marketing of the properties.

 

Source: SFBJ

Palm Beach County Could Allow Thousands Of Apartment Units To Be Built In Agricultural Reserve

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Palm Beach County officials could approve a land use change that would permit more than 2,100 apartments in the Agricultural Reserve to address the lack of workforce housing in the area.

The County Planning Commission approved on April 8 the future land use change to facilitate “essential housing” in the Agricultural Reserve west of Delray Beach and Boynton Beach. The application was initiated by county staff, not a particular landowner. However, the application would apply to five specific parcels covering a combined 269 acres in the area.

The Agricultural Reserve is one of the largest markets for single-family home development in all of South Florida. The development rules encourage low density and a certain portion of land must be set aside for agriculture and open space for every acre developed. Using density of 2.5 units per acre, nearly 11,000 homes have been developed there, according to the county memo.

Given the low-density development pattern in the Agricultural Reserve, there are almost no housing opportunities for most people employed in the workforce, the county memo stated. The median sales price of a home on less than one acre in the area was $880,000, according to the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser. Less than 3% of the homes sold for under $500,000.

“Creating a higher density category with both a significant workforce housing requirement and a preserve requirement will help to address this imbalance while continuing to support the preservation objective,” the county memo stated.

The staff recommendation for the essential housing land use category is eight units per acre and a requirement to preserve 60% of the site and develop 40%. In addition, 25% of the units must be workforce housing.

That land use category would be restricted to locations fronting major roads, like Atlantic Avenue and Boynton Beach Boulevard, in close proximity to Florida’s Turnpike. Under the essential housing proposal, these five sites could be developed with a combined 2,152 units. However, that number could increase to 5,379 units if the owners of these properties are able to preserve land in other locations within the Agricultural Reserve, thus being able to build apartments on the entirety of their land within the essential housing district.

Developers such as GL Homes frequently buy land in the Agricultural Reserve for preservation in order to build home communities in other locations in the area. One of those five locations already has a pending development application.

The essential housing land use plan would need approval from the County Commission at a later date.

 

Source: SFBJ

 

Former Boca Raton IBM Campus: Set For Housing?

Could IBM’s former office complex in Boca Raton become more than just a hub of technology — and become a hub for housing, too?

Sources say the Boca Raton Innovation Campus , as it is now called, is being marketed for sale by its current owners. This time, potential buyers are taking a look at doing something more with the Boca Raton site than using it only for leased office space. The site could become a mixed-use complex featuring apartments, shops and a hotel, too.

Plans are afoot to seek the city’s OK to build 720 apartments, 20 townhomes, a 120-room hotel and 81,000 square feet of retail space. The property’s owners are San Francisco-based Farallon Capital Management and New York-based Next Tier HD, which bought the property for an undisclosed sum in January 2015. They are said to be working closely with Boca Raton to allow new zoned uses for the 130 acres on which the property sits.

The move is in line with changes made to the nearby Park at Broken Sound, formerly the Arvida Park of Commerce, where the city has allowed homes and shops to built on land that formerly was limited to light industrial research buildings. The city is placing a greater emphasis on housing that sits near public transportation, and the Boca Raton Innovation Campus has a Tri-Rail station directly to its east.

The iconic 1.7 million-square-foot building that once housed IBM’s software and hardware developers could remain intact, or parts of it could make way for other uses. But it’s unlikely large portions of the old IBM building will be felled.

In addition to its historic value, the complex houses a range of corporate tenants with varying lease lengths. Tenants include Bluegreen Corp., Tyco Integrated Security, TransUnion, Modernizing Medicine and MDVIP.

Since the purchase, Next Tier and its on-site broker, CBRE, have brought occupancy to 71 percent from 55 percent. More deals are in the works, too. A broker for Eastdil Secured, which is marketing the property, could not be reached for comment.

“Although the property has historic value, it does not have a historic designation from either the city of Boca Raton which could limit any change to the buildings or the National Register of Historic Places, according to Susan Gillis, Boca Raton Historical Society curator. “But we would like it to.”

The former IBM building is special to fans of both technology and architecture. In December 1966, IBM announced its purchase of 550 acres west of what is now Interstate 95, south of Yamato Road and east of Military Trail. IBM was the first company to build an industrial site in the scrubland of the west, according to the Boca Raton Historical Society.

The building was designed by Marcel Breuer and Thomas Gatje and featured buildings for administration and product testing, development labs, manufacturing and distribution. The buildings feature a unique Y-shaped design, considered an engineering marvel for its day.

“The building is considered an oustanding example of the Brutalist style of architecture,” Gillis said.

The building isn’t just important for its aesthetic elements. The architects also designed the structure to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

“They put a lot of thought into those buildings, way back when,” said Michael Masanoff, who was part of the Blue Lake Ltd. group that bought the building from IBM in 1996.

On March 31, 1970, 3,500 people, led by IBM chairman Thomas J. Watson Jr., attended the ceremonial dedication of the new facility, according to IBM’s website.

Over time IBM dominated the city, and “wild ducks” flew high in Boca Raton. That was the nickname of a small group of engineers, marketing experts and communications specialists led by Philip “Don” Estridge. They designed the first personal computer, which was introduced in 1981. (On Aug. 2, 1985, Estridge died in the crash of Delta Flight 191 in Dallas. A former IBM building became the Don Estridge High Tech Middle School, named in his honor.)

By the mid-1980s, IBM employed nearly 10,000 people at this site and in office buildings clustered in the area. But by the end of that decade, IBM had stopped manufacturing at the site, moving this function to North Carolina. Then the software development team moved to Texas.

With employment dwindling, IBM sold the property for $46 million in 1996. The property became the Blue Lake Corporate Center, then the T-Rex Corporate Center, when an ownership group bought it from the Blue Lake group for $138.65 million in 2000.

Private equity fund Blackstone Group bought the site for $192.7 million in 2005 and renamed it the Boca Corporate Center & Campus, until Farallon and Next Tier renamed it the Boca Raton Innovation Campus, or BRIC.

In the years since IBM left the building, the area around the complex has matured. A lively strip of retail shops now fronts the building along Yamato Road, and a new interstate interchange is nearly complete on the south side of the property, at Spanish River Boulevard.

More importantly, demand for in-town housing is huge, especially since the city is virtually out of space for new homes, leading many developers to snap up golf course to transform into houses.

Owners of the Boca Raton Innovation Campus have worked to brighten up the old office interiors with renovations and amenities, including adding a fitness center and daycare and renovating the conference room and lobbies. And since no one is building new office space in Boca Raton, existing office space is becoming scarce, too.

Also helping boost the property’s allure, particularly on the heels of this hurricane season: The building has its own backup generator, installed by the Blue Lake group years ago.

 

Source: Palm Beach Post