Prospect plans Lauderhill project with up to 275 apartments

The developer of an apartment complex with as many as 275 units in suburban Lauderhill is targeting tenants priced out of downtown Fort Lauderdale.

Young professionals and young families “who can’t buy a house and can’t afford the downtown Fort Lauderdale rents, that’s the group we’re kind of pinpointing,” Navish Chawla, a partner in the development arm of DeLand-based Prospect Real Estate Group, told The Real Deal.

Prospect plans to develop Advantis Lauderhill, a mixed-use development with an apartment complex and 9,000 square feet of commercial space on West Commercial Boulevard in Lauderhill, a stairway-shaped suburb northwest of Fort Lauderdale.

Prospect plans to charge monthly rents ranging from $1,400 to $2,200, Chawla said, describing it as market-rate apartments for the working class. Asking rents averaged $2,639 last year in Fort Lauderdale, the highest among nine sub-markets in Broward County, according to a rental property research report by Cushman & Wakefield.

The Lauderhill City Commission on Wednesday approved a special exception use that allows Prospect to build as many as 275 apartments on the vacant, commercially zoned development site at 8456 West Commercial Boulevard.

The owner of the site, Parabens Group LLC, previously won city approval of a site plan for a coffee shop with a drive-through on the easternmost 1.3 acres of the 6.4-acre site. Parabens, led by two Aventura-based managers, Diego Besga and Luciano Gesuiti, bought the property in 2017 for $4.5 million, records show.

Prospect is under contract to acquire the development site, and Chawla said the price is “in the neighborhood of $30,000-plus per door,” or about $7.3 million.

Advantis Lauderhill will have studios and apartments with as many as three bedrooms. Renderings of the development show a five-story rental complex. The initial site plan that Prospect submitted to the city had 245 apartments, but refinements to the site plan might change the total number of units, Chalwa said.

The 24-month construction phase of the Advantis Lauderhill development is set to start in the second quarter of 2023, he said.

Prospect, which recently relocated its Central Florida headquarters from New Smyrna Beach to DeLand, has been active in South Florida.

In July, Prospect and Midtown Capital Partners scored a $64.5 million construction loan for the joint-venture development of Advantis Station, a 242-unit apartment development in the Flagler Village area just north of downtown Fort Lauderdale.

In May, Prospect won city approval in Lake Worth Beach for another Advantis-branded rental housing development, a low-rise cluster of four apartment buildings with 230 units.

The company is also set to acquire a development site in Tamarac, Chawla said, declining to elaborate.