Florida developers competing over land for their next luxury project have been overlooking a real estate goldmine.
The conventional wisdom among Florida developers is that parking requirements mean that lots under an acre just won’t pencil for luxury multifamily projects. But the solution to this architectural hurdle has been there all along. KLAUS Multiparking, the global leader in mechanical parking solutions, unlocks the potential of these small lots by allowing developers to fit multiple stories worth of parking spaces in smaller areas than those required by traditional garage construction. We took a look at The Amalfi, a Kobi Karp-designed tower that will sit on a 0.84-acre lot in Fort Lauderdale, to see how KLAUS Multiparking systems allow developers to tap into these small lots.
Cantilevered elegance, without a parking pedestal
Kobi Karp is known throughout Miami as an architect with vision, and he took inspiration for the 21-story, double-cantilevered tower at Fort Lauderdale from the natural rhythms of the sun.
“The building allows itself to work around the sunrise to sunset, giving maximum natural light in the lobby,” says Karp. “You arrive in the lobby as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.”
Karp’s design for The Amalfi relies on a ground-level lobby, which is complicated by the parking requirements placed on multifamily buildings. Typically, a building must provide two parking spots for each residence, which, in the case of The Amalfi, is a whopping 87 spaces. Due to the physical limitations of parking ramps, going below ground with a traditional garage would be impossible on the sub-acre lot, meaning that the first two stories of the building would have to be dedicated to an expensive and unaesthetic concrete parking structure.
Enter KLAUS Multiparking. By combining a scissor lift that a valet uses to take a resident’s car twelve feet down from the lobby level into a garage with 30 stackers that allow multiple cars to be stored in a single footprint, The Amalfi boasts 104 parking spaces for residents’ vehicles on a single cellar level.
“From day one, Kobi directed us to this below ground parking system,” recalls Gareth Moore, whose company, Moore Group Corporation, is developing The Amalfi. “It allowed us to maximize our parking count over and above city zoning requirements without the need to protrude too far into the subterranean foundation.”
Karp has come to rely on KLAUS Multiparking systems to give him the freedom to bring elegant projects like The Amalfi to life on small lots, which are, increasingly, the only ones left to developers in Miami’s competitive market.
“It allows us to keep the programmatic size and requirements of the vehicle storage to a minimum by reducing the footprint,” says Karp. “We make it more pleasing for the people who walk along the street.”
A shrinking trend
While The Amalfi will certainly be a standout tower, the movement toward smaller lots for multifamily developments is becoming widespread across South Florida. Over the last two decades, Miami has seen explosive growth, with land prices for multifamily projects rising to meet increased demand.
“Miami’s gone parabolic,” says Bruce Roden, CEO & Founder of KLAUS Multiparking. “All the big sites that are two to four acres, they got scooped up.”
Roden says developers like Moore are waking up to the untapped potential of the “thousands” of smaller sites around Miami that have, until now, been overlooked as locations for multifamily projects and hotels. KLAUS offers parking systems that solve for a variety of parking problems: while Amalfi uses scissor lifts and multistackers to enable valet parking below ground, KLAUS’s TRENDVARIO gives developers the ability to offer building users a convenient parking option with a minimum of square footage.
Systems like the G63 and 3015 multiply the parking capacity by stacking cars vertically, whether developers want to go below grade or not. For every small lot across South Florida, KLAUS makes a system that can help developers and architects unlock multifamily potential.
Time is of the essence. Right now, there’s a lack of competition over these smaller sites among developers, and those who can tap experienced architects like Karp who know the value of KLAUS can profit from this undervaluation.
“There’s a lot of them, and the price is relatively inexpensive because no developers have wanted them,” says Roden. “Don’t pass up on these ‘junk sites.’ Use KLAUS to unlock them and maximize your parking, which maximizes the sellable square footage of the property.”
The industry leader
The concept is nothing new. KLAUS Multiparking was founded in Germany in 1964, has many dealers around the world and over a million parking spaces across the globe. The solution has been common on confined lots in Europe and Asia for over 60 years, and Roden has installed KLAUS Multiparking systems in over 200 projects around South Florida.
KLAUS OSHA-certified lifts come with a minimum 20-year usable life and are mechanically simple, avoiding the pitfalls that come with using competing solutions that only have a one-year warranty and rely on proprietary software.
“Out of 200 projects, we have 10,000 platforms and zero lawsuits,” says Roden, who emphasizes the simplicity and reliability of KLAUS systems, whether automated or valet-managed. “You have to make them foolproof. When you have a 19-year-old kid who’s valet parking a Rolls Royce Phantom, you don’t want to have any worries about the lift.”
Developer Moore believes that KLAUS will become an increasingly crucial piece of the multifamily equation in Miami as developers realize that they can use the systems to activate small lots.
“The KLAUS system allowed us to understand that we only had to excavate one story below grade in order to, essentially, fit two levels of parking,” he says. “Without a doubt, we’ll see a trend in the market of a near obsoletion of above ground, drive-up parking ramps.”
To learn more about how KLAUS Multiparking can unlock your next Miami multifamily development, contact Birgit Niilson at birgit@klauspark.com or 305 687 5733.