The Chraibi brothers scored rezoning approval this week for a complex with 224 townhomes in Miami Gardens.
Bluenest Development, led by Salim and Kamil Chraibi, is under contract to buy the 21-acre site for about $14 million, with the deal expected to close by year’s end, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The Chraibis declined to comment on the price for the land at 20700 Northwest 42nd Avenue. Cushman & Wakefield’s Scott O’Donnell, who marketed the site on behalf of the seller, an affiliate of media company iHeart Media, also declined to disclose the price.
The majority of homes will be sold at market-rate rents, a deviation from Bluenest’s traditional focus on developing workforce housing. The project will have some workforce townhomes for city employees, though the exact number is yet to be determined, Salim and Kamil Chraibi said.
Bluenest generally caps prices for its workforce homes at $451,000.
Designed by Pascual, Perez, Kiliddjian, Starr & Associates, the complex will consist of primarily three-bedroom townhomes averaging at about 1,900 square feet, though Bluenest is considering including some four-bedroom homes spanning from 2,000 square feet to 2,200 square feet, according to the Chraibis.
The complex would have six buildings with three townhomes, 13 buildings with four townhomes, 20 buildings with five townhomes and nine buildings with six townhomes.
The project still needs site plan approval, which will be done administratively, Kamil Chraibi said.
Construction is expected to start in the summer or fall of next year and be completed by the end of 2028, the brothers said.
Salim founded Bluenest in 2018, and younger brother Kamil joined about a year later. The firm has become a powerhouse in workforce housing development in south Miami-Dade.
The brothers started out building individual homes across the county and carved out their niche by seizing on South Florida’s affordability crisis and plentiful land supply in the south county area, the last frontier for housing construction in otherwise land-constrained Miami-Dade.
Bluenest has completed 1,000 homes and has roughly 3,000 in various stages of approval and development, the Chraibis have said. The majority of homes are in South Dade, where Bluenest is one of the largest non-institutional workforce housing developers.
Its planned projects include the 90-acre Krome, with roughly 500 townhomes and 76 large single-family homes lining the perimeter of the property and about 10 acres of commercial space, including a grocery store, in south Miami-Dade. Also in south Dade, Bluenest plans K Legacy with 57 townhomes on a 4-acre lot in Princeton.
Miami Gardens, a city in northwest Miami-Dade, has caught developers’ eyes in recent years. Cymbal DLT, led by Asi Cymbal and Hector Torres, completed the 341-unit Laguna Gardens apartment complex last year at 20775 Northwest 17th Avenue. It retroactively converted it to workforce rentals, allowing it to tap into the Live Local Act’s tax breaks for below-market rentals.
Florida Memorial University, a historically Black university, and Redwood Dev Co have partnered on a 52.6-acre project in Miami Gardens, with the $500 million-plus first phase consisting of a pair of eight-story buildings with 500 student beds, 500 workforce units, and basketball courts, a turf field and academic facilities.
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