The Pine Island Road corridor in Cape Coral continues to surge with multi-million-dollar real estate deals, with many of them slated to become apartment complexes.
Culver’s, the Wisconsin-based, fast-casual food chain, purchased 4 acres just west of the Pine Island Road and U.S. 41 intersection. The lot is on the south side of Pine Island Road, just west of a RaceTrac gas station and across from the Merchant’s Crossing shopping center.
Culver’s, under the S&L Properties Cape Coral NE LLC name, bought the land for $1.9 million.
Walt Nelson, a partner with Trinity Commercial Group, represented Culver’s on the deal. He has worked with the company for the past decade, helping bring three other Culver’s locations to Cape Coral.
“The Culver’s will definitely have a nice presence there,” Nelson said. “I’ve been lucky enough to work with Culver’s for 10 years. They’re a great company. They’re great people.”
The outsized parcel means Culver’s is looking to turn around and flip part of its land to another tenant for another building.
“At this point, it’s a little premature to say,” Nelson said of what the second tenant might be.
Jacklyn Rogers of Re/Max Trend represented the sellers, who have been busy in recent years selling various tracts on that southwest corner of where U.S. 41 and Pine Island Road meet.
VK Judd Creek LLC is owned by the Kolter Group, which developed the Verandah single-family home subdivision off Palm Beach Boulevard.
“We do single-family housing,” said Paul Martin, vice president of land development for the Kolter Group. “We do projects all over the state of Florida. We’re considered a semi-custom home builder. We also do high-rises in Sarasota and St. Petersburg. We are not an apartment builder right now in this area.”
Because the city of Cape Coral wanted more multi-family projects for that land, the Kolter Group, which had owned it since 2018, worked with the city to lure different apartment developers to four tracts, all clustered near one another.
The Springs of Cape Coral is already completed.
Kittle Property Group is building the 292-unit Vantage Luxury Apartments on the 15 acres it bought from Kolter for $4 million in December.
To the south of that lot is a bank of trees and the 29 acres that sold April 29 for $3.7 million. The buyer, CC Tav Apartment Holdings LLC, intends to develop 322 apartment units. Rogers, who represented both the buyer and seller in that transaction, said the new owners are not yet ready to release any renderings or specific plans for the development.
Land farther south of that planned complex is slated to sell to Lee County as part of the 20/20 Conservation program later this summer, Martin said.
“For this latest one we did, we sold it as-is,” Martin said, meaning his company did not clear the land. “This was always intended to be a development that would be broken up into pods for apartments. We had four different pods and four different apartment builders that we have sold to.”
Two other, unrelated parcels of land near Pine Island Road also recently sold with one of them slated to be more apartments.
A 24-acre parcel of vacant land with an address of 2029 NE 18th Terrace in Cape Coral, just sold for $4,995,000. Bob O’Connor and Michael Price, brokers with LandQwest Commercial, handled the transaction.
TEG Acquisitions LLC bought the land from CC Properties Investors II LLC. The TEG, which stands for The Embassy Group, has yet to make its plans public. The seller purchased it for $5.3 million in 2004 under the Boca Bay Development LLC name, just as regional real estate prices began inflating prior to the bubble bursting and the Great Recession.
“The property is zoned RML, which allows for 16 units per acre,” O’Connor said, meaning there could be as many as 384 units there.
CC Properties Investors II LLC also recently sold a separate Cape Coral parcel for $4.2 million on June 1, which is slated to become a duplex community with 76 units.
The two parcels were similar in that they were not far north of Pine Island Road, and they offered multiple acres surrounded by residential homes. O’Connor and Price negotiated both of those deals.
“We wanted to have the asking price just a tad under $5 million,” O’Connor said of the most recent of the two deals. “This was a full price purchase and closing.”
Both of those parcels were unique to that part of Cape Coral, O’Connor said, as there just aren’t many multiple acre parcels available to the real estate market.
“They were complete outliers as far as being developable land near rooftop communities,” O’Connor said. “We’ve had two closings in a two-week period, and they were the last of those opportunities.”
