Newgard's $10.5M West Palm Beach Site Bets on Car Condos
Harvey Hernandez's Newgard Group is trading condo towers for car garages, and paying a big premium to do it in West Palm Beach.
Newgard Group has closed on a $10.5 million purchase of a 2.6-acre site at 2500 N. Florida Mango Road in West Palm Beach, where the Miami developer plans Palm Beach Auto Haus, a 20-unit private automotive condominium it is calling a first-of-its-kind luxury lifestyle concept for South Florida.
Why it matters
Harvey Hernandez built Newgard on residential condo towers, including Solaris in Brickell and City Palms in West Palm Beach, so a garage-condo club with padel courts and concierge service is a real pivot in product type, not just geography. It also is not a one-off. Newgard is separately pursuing a similar car-condo project in Miami’s Little River, meaning the firm now treats vehicle storage as a repeatable asset class rather than a novelty. For other South Florida developers hunting sites, the signal is that a well-located urban parcel does not have to compete on price per residential unit. It can be priced against a niche buyer pool of car collectors willing to pay condo-level dollars for a garage, provided the South Florida market has a deep enough base of them, which West Palm Beach has shown through record classic-car auction results at the nearby Palm Beach Auction.
The numbers
The 111,637-square-foot project replaces a bowling alley on the site dating to 1959, according to county property records, which list the building at 29,790 square feet. Those same records show the parcel traded for $3.47 million in June 2021 to an entity called 2500 N Florida Mango LLC, so Newgard’s affiliate, PB Vaults Development LLC, paid roughly three times that price five years later. Each of the planned 20 units is sold outright as real property, not leased, the same ownership model as a residential condo.
What’s next
Newgard still needs to move the project through West Palm Beach’s site plan and permitting process before any construction start, and the developer has not released a completion timeline. Founder Harvey Hernandez said the concept was built to be “a destination centered around ownership, design, community, and unforgettable experiences,” a description that will be tested against actual buyer demand once units go to market and against how the city treats a use type its code was not written for.