Developer revises plans for its North Beach tower with a Denny’s, hotel and condo
After a three-year hiatus, Surfside-based Transacta Developers is ready to move forward on an 11-story condo tower in North Beach. But Denny’s devotees need not fear: a new Denny’s will replace the current one at the oceanfront corner of 72nd Street and Collins Avenue.
Plans for 72+Collins Hotel & Condominium submitted to the City of Miami Beach Design Review Board call for 74 hotel rooms, 168 condo units and a handful of retailers and restaurants. The site is currently home to parking, an empty lot and retailers including a Denny’s restaurant.
The new design is one story higher than a previous plan approved in 2018. Transacta had partnered with Claro Developers for the original project. At the time, the market was saturated with condos.
In March 2020, Transacta faced a $14.2 million foreclosure lawsuit from its mortgage lender Lion Financial. The case closed after Lion Financial gave the partners until December 2020 to pay off its debt.
Bernard Egozi, a partner at the Aventura-based law firm Egozi & Bennett and representative of Lion Financial, declined to comment on pending litigation.
“We have an agreement with our lender, and our project will be moving along,” said Transacta CEO Silvia Coltrane by email. “We are very excited with our new partners.”
The Miami Beach Design Review Board is expected to consider the plans in March, said Neisen Kasdin, managing partner of Akerman’s Miami office. Kasdin is representing the project.
The project may face challenges in the design review process, said Ana Bozovic, founder and real estate market analyst of Analytics Miami.
“It is very hard to get a project off the ground in Miami Beach,” Bozovic said. “A faction in the City of Miami Beach don’t want anything done.”
If approved, the project would take three years to build, Coltrane said. “We believe that the time is right now. There is demand, there is a lot of money available for construction at the present time at low interest rates.”
North Beach is on the cusp of transformation. While South and Mid-Beach have been redeveloped in recent decades, North Beach was overlooked until the last few years. Now both the city and private developers are investing the area. In 2019, Terra Group completed Eighty Seven Park in 2019, motivating many high-fliers to drop millions on units. The same developer is building a 28-acre North Beach Oceanside Park, which will connect to a new 7-mile beachwalk.
Developer Robert Finvarb received design approval last summer for a new town center mixed-used development. But the redevelopment of the Byron Carlyle Theater — is off the table.
Known as the most affordable area in Miami Beach, North Beach attracted the highest number of condo buyers shopping for units below $300,000 in 2020.
Given Florida’s population growth and the expansion of tech and financial companies, Bozovic said, 72+Collins Hotel & Condominium can provide housing to a “missing middle” in Miami Beach, those looking for two-to-three bedroom units ranging from $750,000 to $2 million.
“The people that are migrating here,” she said, “are the upper middle class that buy these types of units.”
The story has been updated to correctly describe Transacta Developers as the sole defendant in the foreclosure lawsuit in March 2020 and to clarify the role of some landowners.
This story was originally published March 1, 2021 at 12:36 PM.
