Seven years after assembling the land, LD&D and IGEQ, with capital partner FrontRange Capital Partners, started vertical construction yesterday on a 181-unit luxury rental Alida Residences, and a 112-key hotel under Marriott's Tribute Portfolio flag, the brand's first in the city.
West Palm Beach has spent the past decade turning into one of the strongest real estate markets in the country, pulled by corporate relocations, Class A office development, and a luxury housing boom. Alida is the first high-rise multifamily project to break ground downtown since the Laurel, which leased at a record clip and posted some of the highest rents in Florida.
"Downtown West Palm Beach has seen strong office and hospitality investment, but very little new multifamily, and that gap is exactly what made this opportunity so compelling," said David Robertson, CEO of FrontRange Capital Partners.
One design decision was to build the hotel and the residences as two separate structures rather than stacking them into one. "Splitting the hotel and residences into two independent projects lets each one be built for exactly what it needs to be, rather than compromising to fit a single structure," said Diego Bonet, Managing Partner of LD&D. The road here was long: the team assembled three parcels in 2019, pushed through a rezoning, paused for the pandemic, and redesigned.
Alida rises 21 stories with studios through three-bedrooms ranging from 500 to more than 2,000 square feet, unobstructed views in three directions, and a 21st-floor pool deck that will be the first true rooftop pool on a downtown high-rise multifamily building, looking out over the Intracoastal, The Breakers, and the Atlantic.
It will also be the first hotel in CityPlace, sitting across from Brightline, surrounded by roughly five million square feet of office space, and down the street from Vanderbilt University's future campus. Tribute Portfolio properties are design-driven independents operating under Marriott's global platform, which makes it a fitting flag for a city courting business travelers who arrive by train.
"Together, they bring new housing, a new hotel brand, and new retail to a corridor built around transit, which is exactly the kind of growth we want to see here," said Mayor James. Both are expected to be completed in 2028.