Developer says this region is Miami-Dade’s best kept secret
By Erik Bojnansky for the South Florida Business Journal
A real estate developer who recently finished an apartment complex in El Portal said the half-square mile municipality is among the Miami-Dade County’s “best kept secrets” with great market potential.
Ken Barrington, managing director of Miami-based Barrington Brothers, LLC, held a ribbon-cutting last month for The Kavista Apartments, an eight-story, 282-unit apartment community at 471 N.E. 83rd Street that was finished in June. Now 55% occupied, The Kavista has apartments between 559 and 1,133 square feet in size that start at $2,100 a month.
Kavista is adjacent to the former Little Farm Trailer Park site, a 15.9-acre vacant area at 8500 Biscayne Boulevard with a $35 million stalking horse bid from an affiliate of The Melo Group, a family-owned real estate development firm that has built thousands of condo units and apartments in towers in Miami.
Barrington, who has plans to build another apartment community next to Kavista called The Launch at Little River, said he loves how El Portal and the surrounding area along the Biscayne Boulevard Corridor has evolved.
“I feel like we have more retail here, we have increasing housing prices,” Barrington said. “This is an area that is kind of emerging.”
Primarily a municipality of single-family houses and small-scale apartments, El Portal officials passed a form-based code back in 2016. The new code includes Zone 4, where small-scale apartments with bungalow courts and retail on the ground floor can be built.
It also has a Zone 5, located east of the FEC train tracks and just west of Biscayne Boulevard. Zone Five, which includes segments of the Little River waterway, allows for mixed-use development in building up to eight stories in height, including design bonuses.
The zone includes most of Little Farm Trailer Park (except for about 76,000 square feet of land located in the city of Miami), Kavista Apartments, and a one-acre strip of land where Barrington proposes to build The Launch.
“That area has the highest density and intensity of the entire village,” said Juan Mullerat, founder of Plusurbia Design, an urban planning firm that helped El Portal craft its code.
In Zone 5, a developer can build 150 dwelling units per acre as of right now. But landowners owning more than seven acres can request a special area plan, similar to that in Miami. Meaning, the landowner can ask for more building rights.
The only property larger than seven acres in El Portal is Little Farm Trailer Park. Now under control of a court appointed receiver, Little Farm Trailer Park is slated to be auctioned off on January 15. Interested bidders will have to beat Melo Group’s starting bid of $35 million.
The Melo Group did not return requests for comment.
Barrington said his company has been involved in conversations about the site in the past, but has no involvement with it now. But Barrington is pleased about the new code, which the village started developing when he began investing in the area back in 2012.
“I believe the village has the desire to increase or create more of an urban core along Biscayne Boulevard and east of the railroad,” Barrington said, adding that village officials have been cooperative as his projects moved through the approval process.
Run by Barrington and his brother Arthur, Barrington Brothers’ past projects include Hawk’s Cay Resort in Duck Key, the Corridor Apartments in Miami’s Shorecrest, Little Havana Rentals, and five high-end homes in Frenchman’s Reserve in Palm Beach Gardens.
In the future, Barrington said he plans to build more projects in nearby Miami. “We like that area. The city of Miami, Shorecrest, Miami Shores, and the Village of EL Portal have been our focus,” Barrington said. “We have grown to understand the area, its demographics, and we understand what we can build from a development standpoint…. and I love the market dynamics.”
External Source: Developer bullish on Miami-Dade’s El Portal real estate – South Florida Business Journal