New development coming near Apopka’s City Center

With a new hotel, a grocery store under construction, and a food hall with nine restaurant tenants and a brewery in the pipeline, the long-awaited Apopka City Center by Taurus Investment Holdings is expected to bring never-beforeseen vibrancy to the city’s small downtown core.

Even before the 35-acre mixeduse project is complete, it’s already catalyzing activity: Other developers are looking to establish a presence on nearby properties.

Within walking distance to the west, land developer Quang Lam, the principal with Lam Civil Engineering, Inc., is seeking approval from the city for a three-story mixed-use building totaling 28,020 square feet with restaurant and retail space on the bottom floors and 19 multifamily units across the top two levels.

To the northeast, on the opposite side of Semoran Boulevard, A&R Real Estate Development LLC, led by Shane Acevedo and David Babinski, is looking to build an 86-unit apartment community on roughly six acres.

Site plans for The Oaks at Monroe call for three-story apartment buildings with garage units, a clubhouse, swimming pool, and dog park.

An entity affiliated with the development company bought the property for $900,000 this past December.

Craig Govan, the development partner at Taurus Investment Holdings, said he had hoped the Apopka City Center — near the intersection of U.S. 441 and S.R. 436 — would initiate more growth downtown. It’s done just that.

“As it was intended, we had really hoped that this would catch on with more and more development and make this (area) a real destination,” he said. “This is great.”

Taurus was chosen by the city as the master developer for the City Center project in 2016. The 118-room Hilton Garden Inn Apopka opened in 2020. It received the Hilton Award of Excellence in 2021, which is given to the top 5% of hotels in the Hilton Garden Inn brand.

Also in the project’s first phase, the historic Highland Manor house was renovated into a 17,000-square-foot event/ wedding venue.

The second phase — including a 42,000-square-foot Winn-Dixie grocery store with three commercial outparcels, a 12,500-square-foot food hall with nine restaurant tenants and a brewery, a 2,500 Starbucks location and a 13,500 multi-tenant retail building — is underway.

Construction has started on the grocery store while the final permits are being secured for the other components.

Celebration hotel sells for $19.48M

Chattanooga-based Vision Hospitality Group entered the Florida market this month with the $19.48 million acquisition of the Bohemian Hotel Celebration in the heart of the Disney masterplanned community.

Founded by Mitch Patel in 1997, the company has built its portfolio to more than 40 nationally branded hotels across eight states. This will be the company’s second Autograph Collection by Marriott hotel following The Edwin Hotel in downtown Chattanooga, which opened in 2018.

The 115-key Bohemian was built in 1999 as part of the Kessler

Collection and was acquired in 2013 by Inland American Real Estate Trust for $17.5 million. Inland later spun off its hospitality assets into a separate, publicly traded REIT called Xenia Hotels & Resorts. Xenia also owns the Grand Bohemian Hotel in downtown Orlando, which is being renovated this year.

Orlando’s hotel industry is benefiting from a strong recovery this year, especially in leisure and group travel. Daryl Cronk, director of hospitality analytics with CoStar Group, said occupancy is up 31% from the same period last year, while ADR and RevPAR are now in line with pre-pandemic levels.

This is a sampling of stories from GrowthSpotter, a premium subscription service from the Orlando Sentinel that focuses on the early stages of real estate development. To subscribe, go to GrowthSpotter. com