BLD Group, JSB Capital Start Construction on Florida Apartments
The property will be situated within the Beaumont master-planned community.
Rendering of Wildwood Apartments. Image courtesy of BLD Group and JSB Capital Group
Construction has commenced on Wildwood Apartments, a garden-style apartment community being developed by BLD Group and JSB Capital Group.
The property, to be situated in the central city of Wildwood, Fla., within the Beaumont master-planned community adjacent to The Villages, will feature 336 apartment homes in a blend of one-, two- and three-bedroom residential layouts.
Apartments will feature stainless steel appliances, wood-look vinyl flooring throughout the living areas, tile backsplashes, tile shower surrounds and linen closets. Private work booths will serve as one of the principal common-area amenities of the property.
Wildwood Apartments is slated to welcome its initial move-ins late next year.
The issues confronted by BLD Group are anything but foreign to other developers across the country. “Probably the biggest challenge we faced and continue to face is material and across-the-board price increases,” Greg Baumann, BLD Group principal, told Multi-Housing News.
“We’ve been able to successfully address this challenge through a mix of factors . . . Everyone on our team has been very cooperative and flexible, from adjusting numbers where necessary, to value engineering considerations and simply thinking outside of the box. We underwrite our projects as conservatively as possible and likewise seek markets with significant pent-up demand. There is an element of luck involved, but being able to take advantage of rent increases has greatly assisted in offsetting many of the cost escalations we have experienced.”
The Villages is a 55-plus community 45 miles northwest of Orlando that, as the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan area of the last decade, has surged from 93,000 to more than 130,000 residents today. Residents of The Villages are steps from an array of retail establishments, among them Publix, Winn Dixie and Lowe’s. An Orlando multifamily report earlier this year found Florida recording solid fundamentals.
