Carpe Real Estate Partners secured approval from a North Miami Beach board for a 440-unit apartment tower, which will head to the commission next month for final approval.
The city’s planning and zoning board on Monday unanimously approved the site plan and variances for Venus, a 26-story, 660,000-square-foot project planned for the 1.1-acre site at 2050 Northeast 164th Street.
The project will likely be heard at the commission meeting on April 19, the developers said.
David Weitz and Erik Rutter, managing partners of New York-based Carpe, said they hope to break ground in October and complete the building about two years after groundbreaking.
Carpe owns the Spotify-anchored Oasis development in Wynwood and is co-developing Wynwood Plaza with L&L Holdings, which will have office and retail space and more than 500 rental apartments.
Carpe paid $4.3 million in December for the North Miami Beach property, a former AT&T parking lot.
The building will have more than 10,000 square feet of retail space, amenities that include a pool and gym, and about 500 parking spaces.
Burgos Lanza is the architect and Kimley-Horn is the landscape architect.
“We’re super excited about the North Miami Beach submarket,” Rutter said, adding that the rentals will be geared toward people who live and work in North Miami, Bal Harbour, Aventura and even Fort Lauderdale.
“There is a lot of demand for apartments there.”
Carpe, like a number of other developers and investors, is betting on long-term demand for multifamily.
The firm, which has about 1,300 multifamily units in the pipeline, plans to build more than 7,000 apartments in South Florida in the next five years.
“Right now, we’re just ramping up,” Weitz said.
Developers and investors have been able to raise rents across South Florida, fueling investors’ appetite for the asset class.
Last year, sales of multifamily projects in the tri-county region reached a record $11.4 billion, more than double the previous record of $5.5 billion in 2016.