Rilea Group Pulls $85.6M Permit for C-PACE-Funded Wynwood Tower

Rilea Group has pulled an $85.6 million new-construction permit for Mohawk at Wynwood, its 300-unit, 488,881-square-foot apartment tower at 50 NE 29th St, converting a capital stack that is nearly all C-PACE debt into an active construction job.

Why it matters

The permit is the signal that matters more than the number attached to it. Rilea closed $149.2 million in construction financing back in January, and $124.2 million of that, or roughly 83%, is C-PACE debt from Nuveen Green Capital, with the remaining $25 million coming from Abanca USA. That is an unusually C-PACE-heavy stack for a ground-up multifamily deal this size, and it stayed parked as financing news for seven months. With the City of Miami now issuing a new-construction permit to contractor Coastal Construction of Miami-Dade, the project moves from a financing story to a biddable job, the point where subs and suppliers can start pricing scope rather than watching from the sidelines.

The numbers

The City of Miami permit, number BD22029540001B001, was issued August 4 with a valuation of $85,555,176 for 488,881 square feet of new construction. The permit record does not list a developer name or a unit count; those figures, 300 units and a project led by Rilea Group under CEO Alan Ojeda and President Diego Ojeda, come from the January financing coverage and the developer’s own account of the deal, not from the county or city system. Rilea bought the Wynwood land in 2021 for $22 million, and the project is slated to include 30,000 square feet of ground-floor retail.

What’s next

Rilea is targeting delivery in 2028, giving Coastal Construction roughly two years to top out a 300-unit tower now that the permit is in hand. The heavy C-PACE weighting in the loan is worth watching as a template: if Mohawk at Wynwood delivers on schedule, expect other South Florida developers chasing entitlements in Wynwood and the surrounding Edgewater corridor to test how far lenders will let C-PACE carry a ground-up deal before requiring a larger conventional tranche.