Multifamily Project Proposed For First Time At 250-Acre Miami Office Park
Apartments could be coming to Waterford Business District, the sprawling office and hotel complex directly south of Miami International Airport.
London and Regional Properties is proposing a plan to add up to 600 apartments to the surface parking lot and grounds surrounding the Pullman Miami Airport hotel at 5800 Blue Lagoon Drive.
The developer’s plans are the first to potentially bring residential to the sprawling 250-acre business park, where more than $37M has been spent since 2020 on upgrades and renovations.
County officials previously approved an agreement to add multifamily to the property in January 2023, but this is the first such proposal.
L&R’s plans call for two eight-story apartment buildings wrapped around parking garages with a combined 1,344 parking spaces.
The plans were submitted as part of a request for a pre-application meeting with Miami-Dade County to discuss modifying the zoning at the site to allow for residential development while keeping the hotel use. L&R is represented by Graham Penn, an attorney at Bercow Radell Fernandez Larkin & Tapanes.
The site plan and renderings submitted with the pre-application indicate that L&R also plans to add 5,800 SF of retail space to the road-facing portion of the hotel parking garage, but a description of the space isn’t included in the letter of intent submitted by Penn.
The developer paid $48.7M in 2019 for the 281-key hotel and 10-acre property, records indicate. The seller was Los Angeles-based Laurus Corp.
L&R declined Bisnow’s request for comment.
A site plan submitted with the proposal shows the apartments rising from the east and west sides of the property, with the 15-story-tall hotel’s freestanding parking garage sitting between them.
The western building would hug the four sides of the parking garage at its core with a separate amenity and pool area, while the eastern tower would extend out from the garage to create a pool courtyard.
Apartments would run from studios to three-bedroom units, with more than half planned as one-bedroom apartments and just 14 three-bedrooms. Palmetto Bay-based Bizi Arq designed the project, with Kimley-Horn & Associates as the landscape architect.
While the plan is the first residential proposal for Waterford Business District, it’s the second recent partial redevelopment to be put forward recently by a hotel owner in the business park. In April, MCR filed a pre-application with the county asking to review plans to add 400 hotel rooms across two buildings to its existing Hilton Miami Airport Blue Lagoon.
The existing seven-building Waterford Business District includes more than 1.6M SF of office space and is owned by a joint venture between Nuveen and Pimco.
Renovations at the property that kicked off in 2020 included the addition of outdoor amenity space, a café, a day care and shuttle service to the airport, along with a tenant phone app.
In April, Assurant signed a 78K SF lease at 701 Waterford Way in one of the largest leases in Miami this year. The homebuilder Lennar also paid $68M in December to buy 5505 Waterford, its headquarters office in the office park.
