AHS Residential scooped up a 17.8-acre mostly vacant site in North Miami Beach for $57 million, marking investors’ insatiable appetite for developable land in South Florida.
The Miami-based company bought the property on the southeast corner of Northeast 159th Street and West Dixie Highway from New North Equities LLC, records show. It was previously approved for a massive mixed-use development.
The selling entity is managed by Gabriel Boano, state corporate records show. He is president of family owned development and construction company Art + Tec Development, based in Bay Harbor Islands.
The majority of the property, or 17.7 acres, consists of land. The remainder has two one-story commercial buildings, at 15530 and 15540 West Dixie Highway.
The land last traded in 2017 for $21.1 million, and the commercial buildings for $557,500 each in 2017 and 2018, property records show.
In 2018, the site was approved for a 2.5 million-square-foot mixed-use project, called New North Town Center. The “micro-city” development was slated to have 1,650 residential units, 260,000 square feet of office space, 175,000 square feet of retail space, a 175-room hotel and a 120,000-square-foot school. The approved heights range from three stories to 20 stories.
New North Town Center was never built.
AHS did not immediately return a request for comment for its North Miami Beach site plan.
The company, led by CEO Ernesto Lopes, is a multifamily developer that has built and sold multifamily communities in South Florida. The company was founded in 2012 and has a portfolio of more than 2,000 units under management in the region, according to its website.
AHS developed the Tamiami Landings complex in Miami-Dade County’s Country Walk area and the Banyan Ridge community in unincorporated Palm Beach County, and sold them for a combined $123 million to AEW Capital Management in October.
In January, AHS also sold the Village at Lake Osborne and the Village at Lake Worth apartment complexes in Lake Worth Beach for a combined $81.5 million to Social Housing. AHS built both communities.