Multifamily developers Bruce Menin, Erik Rutter and Joe Lubeck say South Florida needs more housing, but skittish equity investment is among the many barriers to entry.
The trio, who spoke during The Real Deal Miami Real Estate Forum 2025, pushed back on the notion the tri-county region is struggling with a supply overhang due to hefty completions in recent years. Instead, demand is high and supply is low for the highest quality apartments, the developers said.
Last year, a record 18,600 apartments were completed in South Florida, outpacing 15,000 net new leases, according to CoStar Group. Developers started construction of another 14,515 units in the year that ended Sept. 30, outpacing construction starts during the same period of last year.
The notion that developers are saturating South Florida has been an ongoing theme in the region’s history, Lubeck, CEO of Tampa-based American Landmark, said at the “Too Much, Too Fast? Rethinking South Florida’s Apartment Boom” panel hosted by TRD commercial real estate reporter Francisco Alvarado.
“For the last 10 years … they said, ‘It’s overbuilt, it’s overbuilt, it’s overbuilt.’ But it’s really not overbuilt,” Lubeck said. “There’s certainly ebb and flow in the ability to raise rents and, of course, construction costs and the like. But overall, it’s all about job growth and population growth.”
And the tri-county region has both residential and employment growth, the panelists said. Roughly 80,000 households are projected to move to South Florida in the next five years, with 40 percent of them expected to rent, according to Menin, founding principal of Miami-based Crescent Heights.
“We know that our nation is under-supplied in housing,” Menin said.
American Landmark subsidiary Electra America and the Toledano family’s BH Group are redeveloping a portion of Cutler Bay’s Southland Mall into South Place City Center with roughly 5,000 apartments, a hotel, medical offices, retail on outparcels and a community amphitheater. They are renovating a portion of the existing mall and demolishing some of the retail buildings, including Sears and Kmart.
Crescent Heights completed the 40-story, 588-unit Forma Miami apartment tower in Edgewater last year. The building, which is at least 97 percent leased, is billed by developers as a premier quality tower setting a new standard for the area. This is the first of six towers on 9 contiguous acres Crescent owns, Menin said.
Rutter is co-founder of Oak Row Equities, which has two multifamily towers under construction in Miami’s Edgewater, and this year completed the mixed-use Wynwood Plaza with 509 apartments.
Multifamily analysts and leasing companies say South Florida’s hefty building completions are concentrated in top Miami areas such as Edgewater and Wynwood, or exactly where Oak Row is developing. But Rutter countered the idea that these areas are over-supplied, arguing the issue is a lack of top-quality apartments that are in high demand.
“There was a big wave of supply that came online between 2018 and call it 2021, and the vast majority of that was low-rise. Maybe some of the corners were cut to get projects out of the ground, quickly delivered [with] very small units,” Rutter said. “The renter pool has grown more sophisticated.”
At Wynwood Plaza, which Rutter described as “unquestionably the best” building in Wynwood, demand is strong, with leasing velocity of about 35 units per month, he said. Yet, he conceded Oak Row is offering a month free to incentivize leasing.
“There’s other projects that have just delivered surrounding us. Of course, there are some concessions in the market. That’s marketing,” he said, adding this will probably be phased out once the building is 75 percent leased.
The true issue for South Florida’s multifamily market is skittish equity, the panelists said, again arguing that only top sponsors and projects in premier neighborhoods can get investment.
Debt markets are “robust,” but investment has dried in “the traditional pure play common [limited partner] equity, Rutter said, adding that may not be a bad thing. “It’s going to quell supply naturally, and then institutional capital markets are going to open up again, cycle back in.”
The trio differed in their views of developing in Broward and Palm Beach counties.
Palm Beach County has prospered with the “staggering” number of corporate moves and wealth in-migration, but it’s more difficult to justify development of high-end apartments in Fort Lauderdale, Rutter said. Because construction costs are so expensive, Oak Row would have to charge the same rents as it does in Miami’s Edgewater.
“I can’t extrapolate why you are going to get that in Fort Lauderdale,” he said.
Lubeck is more open to suburban areas such as west Broward, Jupiter and Palm Beach Gardens.
“I am very concerned about overbuilding on the side of the river” in Fort Lauderdale, he said, referring to the New River.
In September, Crescent Heights’ Russell Galbut, through his GFO Investments, and InSite Group, Atlas Hill Real Estate and Prime Finance paid $73 million for the Galleria Fort Lauderdale, with plans to redevelop the mall.
“We’re planning several thousand units,” Menin said. “We wouldn’t have picked up just any site. But this is a placemaking opportunity.”
Menin, who lives in Manhattan, also offered a more tempered view on the consistent topic of discussion at the forum of whether Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win will prompt an influx of New Yorkers to South Florida.
“People love Miami. They love New York. There’s a similar DNA to the kind of people that are attracted to both markets. … I think people are going to continue to move back and forth,” Menin said. “I think we have to take a little bit of a wait and see.”
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