Opterra Capital’s plans to convert a 1980s-era Holiday Inn into an apartment complex received the unanimous endorsement of Boca Raton’s Planning and Zoning Board Thursday.
The local firm plans to turn the 183-room Holiday Inn & Suites at 701 Northwest 53rd Street into a 125-unit apartment building with a 5,550-square-foot restaurant and 4,500 square feet of retail.
The project calls for 74 efficiency apartments, 43 one-bedrooms and eight two-bedrooms. Thirteen apartments will be designed as affordable housing, and seven will be workforce units.
An affiliate of Boca Raton-based Opterra, led by CEO Glenn Alba, and Charleston, South Carolina-based Montford Group paid $13.3 million for the hotel in July 2021. The seller, Archer Capital Group, paid $14.1 million for the hotel in 2016.
“This is not the most attractive building,” the developers’ attorney David Milledge said. The developers plan to add “trims and recesses” to improve the façade’s appearance, he said.
Plans call for pedestrian paths to connect the building’s entrances to Boca Raton’s El Rio Trail, plus adding landscaping and building a bus shelter.
Rental rates for the market-rate units will be relatively affordable, Mileage said, without disclosing rates. The average rental rate in Boca Raton is $3,183 a month, according to Zillow.
Completed in 1988, the Holiday Inn & Suites is within The Park at Broken Sound, a 700-acre community with two golf courses, plus office, industrial and apartment buildings.
Plans for the development still require approval by the Boca Raton City Council.
Boca Raton officials approved Meyers Accesso’s plans to build a 222-unit apartment next to the Atrium at Broken Sound office building in December.
Pebb Enterprises, BH Group and the Related Group are redeveloping the 29-acre Office Depot campus in the Park at Broken Sound into a community with 500 apartments and a 37,000-square-foot Equinox gym.
In October 2021, a few months after buying the Holiday Inn & Suites in Boca Raton, Optimal paid $9.1 million for 39 condo units in the Gables Court Condominiums in southwest Miami-Dade.