Wilton Manors Cafe Ousted as Site Flips to Waypoint for $11M

Lucia Nunez got the letter about a month ago. The Alchemist Cafe, the garden restaurant she ran inside The Yard at 2430 NE 13th Ave in Wilton Manors, closed its doors this week so crews can clear the site for a 190-unit apartment building. “We’re not going anywhere,” she told Miami New Times, but the cafe is gone from that address regardless. The other tenants at The Yard had already moved out.

The site had been living on borrowed time since Kaplan Residential picked it up years ago and walked it through city approvals for a project called Generation at Wilton Manors. This spring, Kaplan sold the entitled land to an affiliate of Waypoint Residential for $11 million, and the closing letter followed not long after.

Why it matters

This is the pattern behind a lot of lost small businesses in South Florida: not a sudden eviction notice, but years of a landlord sitting on entitlements while month-to-month tenants keep paying rent on a site that was never going to stay a cafe. Broward County Official Records shows Kaplan Wilton Manors LLC deeding the parcel to an affiliated entity, Kaplan Residential LLC, on March 5, 2024, for $10 consideration, the kind of single-purpose-entity transfer that typically precedes a sale or a construction loan closing. A separate Broward filing from February 2024 names Wilton Manors City in a government orders and resolutions record, consistent with the site-plan approval the city needed to clear before Kaplan could sell an entitled, shovel-ready lot.

The numbers

• 190 residential units planned across a six-story building, per the City of Wilton Manors project page.
• Roughly 8,500 square feet of commercial space in the plan, including a standalone building, per the same city page.
• $11 million sale price in April for the 2.92-acre site to a Waypoint Residential affiliate, below the roughly $12.2 million Kaplan had put into assembling the parcel.
• $10 consideration on the March 2024 Kaplan-to-Kaplan deed, instrument 119431956, a non-arm’s-length internal transfer.

Kaplan did the hard, slow work of land use approvals in South Florida and still sold for less than it spent assembling the site, a reminder that entitlement risk cuts both ways even in a market this tight.

What’s next

Waypoint’s affiliate now controls a fully entitled site with no legal tenants left to clear. Watch for a building permit at 2430 NE 13th Ave / 1225 NE 24 St, the next public marker that vertical construction is actually starting. Some reporting has suggested the cafe’s owners could get a shot at the project’s future commercial space, but nothing filed with the city locks that in, and Nunez has not said publicly whether she would take it.