Adler Buys Land for Biscayne Bayfront Multifamily

MIAMI—Multifamily is on the upswing in Miami. The latest developers to announce a new joint venture multifamily project are Adler Group and ECI Group.

Miami’s Adler and Atlanta’s ECI aim to tap into the rising demand for Miami multifamily with a project that features two luxury 20-story apartment towers that overlook Biscayne Bay. The multifamily project will sit on a 2.84-acre site at 7950 NE Bayshore Court. The joint venture will break ground on the multifamily towers later this year and deliver new apartments about 24 months later.

The site was the former home of the historic Mike Gordon’s Seafood Restaurant. The property is fully entitled for multifamily development within the confines of a Major Use Special Permit (MUSP). Miami’s Apollo Bank financed land deal.

“We were able to acquire a superior location that allows us to do a project like this and offer an economic opportunity for our future tenants,” Adler Group CEO Michael M. Adler tells GlobeSt.com. “We’ll be able to offer for under $2,000 a month a brand new multifamily unit located directly on the water that is professionally managed and maintained.”

News of the multifamily development comes as Miami experiences an uptick in demand for apartment living and a depletion of available rental supply. According to a recent market study from Focus Real Estate Advisors, the overall average vacancy rates in the Miami multifamily market declined steadily over the past seven quarters, dropping to 4.7% as of the fourth quarter of 2011. The report predicts that swelling demand and extremely limited multifamily supply currently in development both market-wide and in Miami’s Upper East Side indicate these trends will continue.

The Adler-ECI development aims to fill a void of available multifamily product in the mainland Miami communities north of the Downtown/Brickell market and south of the Aventura/Sunny Isles market. The new multifamily development will sit just north of NE 79th Street, directly across the 79th Street Causeway from Miami Beach and halfway between Downtown Miami and Aventura.

“We have not been able to find the right economics for high-rise multifamily projects on the waterfront for many years because they were all acquired by condominium converters,” says Adler, whose company has developed more than 8,000 multifamily units. “The difference in pricing was such that there was always the hope that at a high price someone would buy a converted unit. Obviously that was thwarted a couple of years ago when the conversion craze was stopped in its tracks.”