Miami-based One Real Estate Investment just put 53 acres next door to the Disney parks under contract with plans to build a mix of apartments and rental townhomes.
Bob Barton, Senior VP of Development, had a pre-application meeting this week with Osceola County’s Development Review Committee to discuss plans for the site between Sherberth Road and Reedy Creek Boulevard, just west of Disney’s All-Star Resort and south of the Animal Kingdom theme park.
The property has Commercial Tourist zoning, which allows up to 40 multifamily units per acre.
Initially, Barton said the company was looking to develop roughly 1,000 units of rental housing on the site with both garden apartments and townhomes, but after talking through the development standards and impact fees with staff, he told GrowthSpotter the unit count would be dramatically reduced.
The concept plan showed a new east-west road spanning the length of the property that would connect Sherberth to Reedy Creek and separate the project from the Magic View Resort to the south. A typical OREI development includes a mix of one-, two-, and three-bedroom apartments across multiple floorplan layouts that aim to elevate the living experience. The developments typically provide amenity packages with fitness and yoga studios, pools and cabanas, dog parks, saunas and more.
The biggest hang-up was the potential for school impacts. Planner Photenie Burnette said the school district could look for mitigation beyond impact fees for a development with that density. That could include designating a school site to accommodate the students.
“I know that you have a 50-acre site, and if they’re going to ask you for a school on your site that gets tricky,” she said. “But I just know that with that amount of impact … they may be interested in working with you to see if there’s any other alternative plans or neighboring property.”
Barton said he would contact the school district directly before submitting a site development plan. “We don’t want to go down this road and then find out we’ve got to do something,” he said. “We’re using a local civil engineer, so I’m pretty confident we’re going to get all the details and everything right, and our architects work in Florida, so we’re good on that. I just wanted to get this in front of you guys, so we appreciate it.”
The parcel was previously owned by Walt Disney Parks and Resorts and last changed hands in 2015 when it sold for $12.5 million to Lalu-Gacy House Project LLC for a vacation home development that never materialized.
OREI has over $1 billion in assets under management with over 7,500 units and has acquired and sold over 10,000 value-add multifamily units since its inception. In 2022 OREI broke ground on over 800 units and has over 1,500 units planned for 2023. The development strategy is focused on garden-style apartment communities throughout the southeast. This would be the firm’s first new build in Florida.
OREI’s target customers are people earning between 80-120% of the average median income in communities benefiting from net migration, job growth, wage growth, and lower cost of living. The firm selects submarkets with three straight years of rent growth and greater than 90% occupancy. In addition to the new development, OREI will complete 14 acquisitions of existing multifamily valued at over $560 million.
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