LCOR Secures Loan for Miami Apartment Tower

• LCOR landed a $192.5 million construction loan from Natixis for its 544-unit tower at 1775 Biscayne Boulevard.
• The loan pencils to $354,000 per unit and matures in 2029.
• It's LCOR's first ground-up development in Florida, on a 1.1-acre site the New York firm bought for $49 million in 2022.
• Substantial completion is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2028.

The Loan, and What It's Building

LCOR has broken ground on 1775 Biscayne, a 39-story, 544-unit rental tower a block from Margaret Pace Park in Edgewater, backed by a $192.5 million construction loan from Natixis Corporate and Investment Banking. Institutional Property Advisors' Andrew Cohen and Max Herzog arranged the financing. The tower, designed by ODP Architecture with interiors by Asprea Studio, will carry more than 40,000 square feet of amenities, over 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and a 448-space garage. Units run studio to three-bedroom, plus 29 penthouses.

The building rising now is trimmer than the one LCOR filed in 2023. That plan called for 42 stories, 50,000 square feet of amenities and 628 parking spaces. The unit count held at 544, but the height, amenity space and garage all came down before the first shovel went in.

LCOR paid $49 million for the 1.1-acre site in 2022, its entry point into a Florida market it had circled for years. The firm, which has built more than 300 large-scale projects over nearly five decades, already holds stakes in Lincoln Pointe in Aventura and Tortuga Pointe in St. Petersburg. This is its first project built from the ground up in the state.

Building Into a Glut

LCOR is financing a Miami tower at the same moment CoStar Group's numbers show the region overbuilt: 18,600 units delivered in 2024 outpaced leasing by roughly 20 percent, and last year's 12,718 completions still beat leasing by about 1,000 apartments. Most of that supply skews four- and five-star. South Florida's median asking rent hit $2,284 in May, down 2.2 percent year over year, according to Realtor.com.

Developers are pressing ahead anyway. Down the street in Edgewater, Cain and Kushner paid $43.1 million last month for a 1.5-acre site where they plan a 40-story, 364-unit tower. To the north, Dezer Development won unanimous planning board approval on June 25 for the 586-unit Dezerland Park West in North Miami. The bet across all three: out-of-state move-ins, including the recent wave from blue states to red ones, will absorb the supply once the cranes come down, and each firm is picking submarkets it thinks won't get overbuilt twice.

What's Next

LCOR is targeting substantial completion in the fourth quarter of 2028, a roughly two-and-a-half-year build for the firm's first Florida tower. The next marker to watch: whether Miami's 96.4 percent occupancy rate, among the tightest of any major rental market, holds long enough for 544 more units to lease up without denting the rent LCOR underwrote.