On the edge of Miami-Dade County’s built world, where single-family home subdivisions plateau into open expanses, sits a 90-acre tract. The land in south Miami-Dade is neatly carved into distinct uses: one parcel planted with row crops such as soybeans, another devoted to a palm tree farm, a third to an avocado orchard and a fourth to a nursery for a variety of plants.
Here, developers Salim and Kamil Chraibi plan roughly 500 townhomes and 76 large single-family homes lining the perimeter of the property. Every home will be capped at workforce prices and 20 percent of units will be reserved for households earning no more than 140 percent of Miami-Dade’s $87,200 median income.
“We are building townhomes that are barn style … that would match the agricultural style around,” Salim said, showing a rendering of the barn-like façades with steep pitched metal roofs.
The project embodies the Chraibis’ niche: developing workforce housing in south Miami-Dade.
Bluenest Development, the Miami-based firm which Salim founded in 2018 and Kamil, the younger brother, joined about a year later, has seized on the rich supply of cheaper land in the south county area and on the high demand for housing priced below market rate.
It’s hardly the only firm leaning into this play. During the recent years’ boom in demand due to an influx of out-of-staters, developers rushed to south Dade, the county’s last frontier for housing development, but Bluenest far outpaced many of its contemporaries.
They “are very aggressive and they do what they say they are going to do. … They built a very good reputation in a short amount of time,” said Jason Bass, who last year was part of a partnership that sold a 20-acre development site in Homestead to Bluenest. “The dealings I’ve had with Bluenest … they never ask for any extensions [to land acquisition closing] or concessions that are much to speak of.”
The numbers show the momentum. Bluenest’s portfolio is heavily concentrated in the southern part of the county and includes 1,000 completed homes and a pipeline of about 3,000 homes in various stages of approval and development, according to the firm.
As South Florida quickly turned into a buyer’s market over the past year, the Chraibis’ target demographic of buyers insulates them from the slowdown, largely because demand for below-market priced homes is perennial.
“It seemed like everybody was willing to build high-end mansions; $10-, $15-, $20 million homes. But then when you looked at the median income, I was wondering where all of these people were living.”
Still, they aren’t immune to the economic headwinds that developers are facing, including elevated materials and labor costs, and unfavorable interest rates. Not to mention lingering doubts about the long-term viability of south Miami-Dade — an area that offers farmland, strip malls and subdivisions pushing toward the Everglades but lacks the Miami allure of oceanfront views, glitzy architecture and 24/7 entertainment.
But Bluenest is accelerating. By the third quarter of next year, it expects to complete roughly 400 homes and start construction of nearly 600, Salim said. His ambitions are bigger.
“Our goal by 2028,” he said, “is to start delivering a thousand homes a year.”
It’s ambitious. In the cutthroat world of real estate, the developers who scale quickly tend to be deeply embedded in the industry. Many are born into families that already hammered out a reputation in South Florida and take the reins from their parents. Others, who start out as unknowns, usually run in circles where they can tap into deep-pocketed investors.
As South Florida transplants, the Chraibis have none of that yet, scaled in less than a decade to become one of the top non-institutional workforce housing developers in south Miami-Dade.
Zero to 4,000
Salim, 36, and Kamil, 31, are newcomers to South Florida but not to real estate. Growing up in Casablanca, Morocco, the pair often joined their mother, architect and land broker Nadia Daoudi, on job sites. Their grandmother had developed homes and apartment buildings in the 1960s in the city.
“My grandmother was always pushing everybody to be in real estate. ‘Stick to the rock,’” Salim recalled her saying. “We were always attracted to real estate and it was natural in a way for us to transition because it was always something that really attracted us.”
Although they moved to South Florida to pursue other careers, Salim came to play golf for Johnson & Wales University, intending to play the sport professionally, and Kamil went to Florida International University, planning on going into tech but real estate beckoned. The gap in housing supply hit them immediately.
“It seemed like everybody was willing to build high-end mansions; $10-, $15-,
$20 million homes. But then when you looked at the median income, I was wondering where all of these people were living,” Salim said. “Quickly, we found that there was a huge demand, that it [a home] would be on the market for a couple of days and then it would go under contract.”
From 2018 to 2020, they completed their first standalone homes and duplexes, including five in Miami-Dade’s Brownsville and West LIttle River, and Miami’s Liberty City on lots they purchased for a combined $183,100, records show.
Finding construction loans was difficult, and Salim tried his luck with Key Biscayne-based family firm London Financial, which generally doesn’t finance construction debt less than $1 million. Still, it provided Bluenest with a $650,000 construction loan in 2018 for its first few homes, records show.
Ed London, London Financial manager, just had a “gut feeling” about Salim after they met for lunch, he said.
“He seemed to be a hustler and somebody with ambition,” London said. “You know when someone knows what they’re talking about.”
The brothers credit their quick scaling to delivering on promises to their partners, and their perspective. Their immigrant background allows them to truly see the opportunities in the U.S., they said.
“It’s almost impossible to do what we have done in any other country in the world,” Salim said. “You have a big market, you have people who are buying, you have access to capital.”
Those who’ve had dealings with the Chraibis have described them as “workaholics” and “above-board businessmen.”
But it’s just as much about work as it is about embedding themselves in the community. Many of the foreign developers who scale in South Florida usually have financial backing from investors in their countries of origin. The Chraibis, whose father, Khalid Chraibi, died when they were young, cited some “financial hardship” during their youth. Although they started with some backing from “friends and family,” they forged the majority of their investor relationships with South Florida family offices and high net worth individuals.
As of late, Salim also has been making the rounds at local podcasts, describing his focus on workforce housing, a topic that’s bound to garner him an audience given Miami-Dade’s affordability crisis.
It’s paid off. Although Lennar, a Miami-based homebuilding giant founded over 70 years ago, has a monopoly on south Miami-Dade residential development thanks to its financial wherewithal and backing from the likes of Warren Buffett and massive land banks — every land use attorney and developer The Real Deal contacted for this story knew the Chraibi brothers and cited them as a major force in the area.
Bluenest is phasing out from building individual homes and focusing on communities, with their portfolio consisting of 23 complexes in various stages, from planned to completed and under construction, primarily in south Dade.
The townhomes have commonalities: usually spanning about 1,900 square feet with at least three bedrooms and higher-end finishes that can be found in $2 million homes, including impact windows and doors; waterfall countertops; higher ceilings; some with foyers and powder rooms, or half-baths in the foyers; and pajama rooms upstairs with couches where families can hang out.
Prices are capped at $451,000, squarely targeting the workforce that wants to own a home in the county, where the median home price hovers at about $500,000, without sacrificing on size, yard space and finishes.
Many of the projects are much smaller than their Krome one. Its pipeline includes: K Legacy with 57 townhomes on a 4-acre lot in Princeton, Palm Villas with 33 duplexes on another 4 acres in Naranja, Park Villas with 76 homes on 9.5 acres near Homestead and Limonar Estates with 34 duplexes on a 4.2-acre site in Naranja.
They are “being very entrepreneurial because not every project can be a 300-unit project [because] there’s less of that land. There’s more of these smaller pieces,” said land use attorney Anthony De Yurre. “The question is how do you … build out the business model. Obviously they have figured it out.”
The Chraibi code
The math has to math and that starts with the price of land, Kamil said.
“Because if you buy it too expensive, it becomes impossible to create all of that unless you want to lose money in the process,” he said. “We have been very careful in how we would buy.”
They then take on the financial risk of upzoning the sites, including paying attorneys, architects and deposits for the properties, because more density allows for lower home prices.
“Instead of building K Legacy with 30 or 40 homes, we are building 57. That extra 27 is allowing us to bring workforce [prices],” Salim said. “Versus if we were just doing 40 single-family homes, we would sell them in the $700,000s. It’s still a viable plan. But that’s not really what we would like to create.”
Sometimes, deals just work out. When Bluenest approached Sam Accursio, whose family has been farming in south Dade since the 1960s, seeking to purchase the Park Villas site, they didn’t set a price contingent on project approval or based on appraisals. Instead, Accursio asked for $4 million, and Bluenest agreed.
“That’s a lot of money for 10 acres,” Accursio said. “I think that [$4 million] would have been the top of the market in that area at the time.”
While construction costs have stabilized in the last two years, though labor costs remain more of an issue, Salim said Bluenest is protecting itself as much as possible by having in-house general contractors and a proprietary tech tool to identify and evaluate prospective sites for purchase. Elevated interest rates are more of an issue, as their target buyers are concerned about their monthly payments.
Bluenest’s hedge against buyers cooling to closing on homes? It works with Miami-Dade’s down payment assistance programs, which provide low-interest and forgivable loans to help buyers front the money for a home. Bluenest also offers rate buydowns, and accepts FHA and VA loans.
The brothers don’t doubt south Miami-Dade’s potential, though the issue of a lack of commercial space and amenities isn’t lost on them. Their Krome project will include about 10 acres of commercial space, including a grocery store, a linear park and could also have a school and padel courts, they said.
“You don’t want to sit in traffic for a long time,” Kamil added. “So if you can have a grocery store next to your house, if you can have green space near your house, where you can go to the gym and walk with your kids, and maybe potentially school, it saves you a lot of time.”
The bigger obstacles, the Chraibis said, are building workforce homes quickly enough and NIMBYism.
The county is short nearly 90,200 affordable units, Salim said, citing a report by nonprofit Miami Homes for All. Many of those who can no longer afford Miami-Dade are moving elsewhere in the state, prompting fears that South Florida is losing its workforce, the backbone that supports the tri-county region.
“You have a lot of people who bought homes in the ‘70s and ‘80s. … You build townhomes [nearby and] they are mad,” Salim said. “People think of workforce housing as ‘Oh, these people are going to come and they are going to destroy my neighborhood.’ No, these are teachers, teaching your kids at school, these are people who show up at your door when you call 911. … [The] workforce is what makes a city.”
