PulteGroup Inc. paid $5.1 million for a former radio tower site in suburban Palm Beach County where the national home builder plans to build 164 townhouses – one of several non-residential South Florida properties the company has acquired to repurpose.
Atlanta-based Pulte paid the seller, Tonset Co., a price equal to $268,421 per acre for the 19-acre site in Palm Springs near West Palm Beach.
The home builder plans to build the townhouses in a development called Preston Square. “We’re excited about that one because it will be priced from the mid-$200,000s,” Brent Baker, president of the southeast Florida division of Pulte, told The Real Deal.
Baker said the Palm Springs development site is a former radio tower site, one of several properties that Pulte has purchased and repurposed in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Among them, Pulte is building 340 townhouses and 305 single-family homes in a Hollywood development on a former golf course. Prices at the development, Parkview at Hillcrest, start in the low $300,000s for townhouses and the high $300,000s for single-family homes.
Pulte also plans to build 130 attached condominiums on a closed nine-hole section of a golf course at the Boca Lago Country Club in Boca Raton.
“When you look around, there are not a lot of vacant tracts of land. And so, we’re having to repurpose golf courses, radio tower sites,” Baker said.
Pulte’s biggest project in South Florida, called The Fields, will unfold on a cluster of polo fields in Lake Worth, where the company plans to build 916 single-family homes and townhouses. Starting prices will range from about $335,000 for townhouses to the high $300,000s for single-family homes.
The demand for South Florida homes priced under $500,000 far exceeds the supply, Baker said.