Witkoff Just Financed the First 890 Apartments on the Old Miami Arena Site With a $302.6 Million Loan

Witkoff and Monroe Capital closed a $302.6 million construction loan for the first phase of their residential project at 700 North Miami Avenue, the former Miami Arena site, Commercial Observer reported July 20. Apollo Global Management's Athene Annuity and Life Company and J.P. Morgan Chase took an existing loan with $57.3 million outstanding and increased it by $245.3 million. The joint venture bought the 4.7-acre vacant site for $94 million.

What is planned

The master plan calls for three residential towers plus 540,000 square feet of office and roughly 50,000 square feet of retail, per Commercial Observer. Florida YIMBY, citing the permit filings, describes phase one as an approximately 600-foot tower with 894 apartments, 17,367 square feet of ground-floor retail, a nine-story garage of 167,237 square feet and 2,078 parking spaces across the plan, designed by Kobi Karp Architecture with Coastal Construction as general contractor and an estimated construction cost of nearly $270 million. The two publications disagree on unit and retail counts, so treat the figures as a range.

My read

Read this next to the condo numbers. Miami-Dade resale condos were sitting at roughly twelve months of supply in July while the county median slid to $400,000. In the same window, institutional lenders wrote a $300 million check to build more than 2,000 rental apartments one block from the train station. That is a bet that Downtown's next residents rent before they buy, and it tells every landlord with a unit in Downtown or Edgewater that a wave of brand-new competition is coming with concessions attached. If you own an investment condo in the corridor, your pricing power over the next three years is being decided on this site.