Downtown’s residential development boom is in full swing. Three apartment buildings are completed, four more are in various stages of construction and six condo projects are under way. By the time they are all finished, 2,031 new homes will be added within less than a mile of downtown’s waterfront.
The developers hail from Largo to Miami, Dallas to Cleveland. But with so many of them in the mix, how do they know they haven’t overestimated the demand?
“No bank is going to let you build something without a feasibility study. But the biggest problem with a feasibility study is they don’t consider who else is doing a feasibility study at the same time,” chuckled Jack Bowman, veteran St. Petersburg real estate agent and a developer of the Cloisters, the project that started downtown’s first condo building boom in 2000.