MIAMI-The Miami-Dade County Planning Advisory Board and Board of County Commissioners has endorsed the $400-million, master-planned Biscayne Shores Village and voted to transmit the plans to Florida's Department of Community Affairs. On the strength of this endorsement, next week the New York City-based Dynamic Group is gathering 10 architectural firms to share design ideas for the project. In its final form, whatever that takes, Biscayne Shores will offer 825 units of multifamily, 135,000 sf of retail and 55,000 sf of office space as well as civic components in a 14.5-acre complex and the adjacent, county-owned, seven-acre park.

All urban infill, the project represents the largest available parcel of contiguous land in the eastern corridor of Miami-Dade County. For its development, the Dynamic Group enlisted Coral Gables-based Codina Realty Services (recently acquired by Florida East Coast Industries) as project director and Dover, Kohl & Partners, an urban planning firm also based in Coral Gables, as master planner.

The master plan calls for a mix of flats, duplex and townhouse residential units; an early childhood education center; a civic building; Main Street; and several mini-parks. When the project was unveiled in June 2005, Stephen Nostrand, Codina's director of investment banking, told GlobeSt.com the projected cost was $300 million. The jump to $400 million, he now says, "came about when we actually put pencil to paper."

He says he doesn't anticipate any problems in obtaining the next required approvals and expects they will be in hand by May 1. "Re-zoning will take about four months," he says, "and we expect to start pre-construction marketing this November or December and begin construction in second or third quarter 2007. It's a five-year project."

Participants in the architectural planning meeting include five local-area architects and five from other parts of the US. He declined to name them, but says, "criteria for their selection called for them to have done mixed-use projects that, at a minimum, included residential and retail and, at best, also included office. This needs to look like a village, not a project, and have a variety of architectural elements."

While residential units will vary from about 800 sf to 2,100 sf, the average will be 1,200, according to Nostrand. "Selling prices will be in the mid-$400s to high-$400s per sf, which will put the average at between $550,000 and $560,000, compared to as much as $800 per sf for residential product Downtown," he says. "This is designed for owner-users who want to live near their work."

Nostrand says that without soliciting equity investors, "we've had inquiries from private and public real estate investment entities, and we're in discussion with several." Development of different components of the complex could be split among different development partners.