🌞Not Your Grandpa's Boca

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Happy Saturday Highest & Best! Today we’re talking cranes, condos and cool downs. Here’s the playlist:

🕺 Boca’s new groove

🏗 Trump seeks 1,500 condos

🐌 Florida’s migration is slowing

Let’s get to it!

From Punchlines to Skylines

Remember when Boca Raton was a Seinfeld punchline, forever linked to early bird specials and shuffleboard?

These days, Boca’s more about cranes, condos and some very deep-pocketed investors. Here’s a sampling from just this month:

💰 Michael Dell—yes, the computer guy— is proposing a 60-unit luxury condo building at the Boca Raton Resort & Club. Dell's New York-based firm, BDT & MSD Partners, envisions an eight-story property next to his 1,047-room luxury resort, the South Florida Business Journal reported. Dell’s firm wants permission to exceed local height limits to construct the 100-foot-tall condo.

🗂 Office Depot sold its Boca Raton corporate campus in 2023, and the new owners have a vision that goes beyond, well, offices. Boca’s Planning and Zoning Board just approved plans for 500 apartments on the site, along with 43,000 square feet of retail and a 36,000-square-foot fitness center, the Real Deal reported. The project, by Related Group, BH Group, and Pebb Enterprises, will demolish 246,000-square-feet of office space on the 29-acre campus, while two other corporate buildings (where Office Depot is now a tenant) will stick around.

Isaac Toledano, co-head of BH Group, said putting residences on a formerly corporate site makes sense, given a growing need for housing near Palm Beach County’s business hubs.

“We see a lot of demand coming from Palm Beach County—New Yorkers who want to live in Boca and work in West Palm Beach,” Toledano said in an interview this week.

 🚆Speaking of commuting: developer 13th Floor Investments just got approval to build “Boca Village,” a 340-unit apartment complex right next to the Tri-Rail train station at 680 West Yamato Rd. The eight-story development will include affordable and “workforce” housing, available to tenants of varying incomes.

👋 How about one more? Mutual of America Life Insurance Company wants to build 287 apartments on another Boca corporate campus, where it also owns an office. The firm submitted an application to local building officials, saying that some of those future rentals, at 1150 NW Broken Sound Parkway will be designated as “affordable.”

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• Topping Off, January 6, 2025

• A Dash of Nope, December 21, 2024

• Cash In, Cash Out, December 14, 2024

• Snaps of Luxury, December 7, 2024

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Trump’s Towers

President-elect Donald Trump will enter the White House in less than two weeks and in the meantime, his real estate firm is …seeking approval for a massive condo development near Miami.

The Doral City Council will meet January 15 to consider green lighting a plan to build 1,498 condo units on the grounds of the Trump National Doral golf club, according to the South Florida Business Journal.

Trump Endeavor 12 LLC, a company tied to Donald Trump Jr., submitted the proposal last year to rezone 56 acres at 4400 NW 87th Ave., and got preliminary approval for it in August.

🏗 It seeks to build: four 20-story condos, 3,522 parking spots, and nearly 142,000 square feet of commercial space, according to the Business Journal. Prices for the condos will start at $2 million. Because, of course. 🤷‍♀️

🤔 If the project moves forward, it would be the first new condo actively for sale in South Florida that’s branded by a sitting president—which, honestly, I didn’t even know was a category.

Condo sizes would range from 885 to 5,000 square feet, with a mix of one- to four-bedroom units: 332 one-bedrooms, 557 two-bedrooms, 280 three-bedrooms, and 309 four-bedrooms, according to the Business Journal.

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New Yorkers Still Coming, Just Not as Much

Migration to South Florida is slowing down, but Miami residents probably haven’t noticed.

In 2024, there were 20,909 people in Miami-Dade County who exchanged their out-of-state driver’s license for a Florida license (a sign of establishing residency), according to a report by the Miami Association of Realtors. That’s 3% fewer move-ins last year than there were in 2023.

Still, the number of Miami newcomers in 2024 was 17% higher than it was in pre-pandemic 2019, when only 17,895 out-of-staters got themselves a new Florida license.

It’s a different story elsewhere in South Florida, where migration has officially dipped lower than it was before the Covid pandemic:

🌴 Broward County, home to Fort Lauderdale, saw 18,527 newcomers get Florida licenses last year. Compare that to the 20,036 who did so in 2019. That’s an 8% drop.

🌴 Palm Beach County had 23,074 move-ins last year — or 3% fewer than it did in 2019.

🍎 One thing remained constant: South Florida newcomers are overwhelmingly from New York. Last year, 4,056 New Yorkers relocated to Miami-Dade County, while Broward and Palm Beach Counties saw 3,892 and 5,697, respectively.

That’s it for today!

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