Sternlicht's Starwood Buys Naranja, Little River Rentals

Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Asset Management has paid a combined $63.8 million for two affordable housing complexes in Miami-Dade County, buying Magnolia Landing Apartments in Naranja and Lafayette Square in Little River from Boston-area developer Gatehouse Group.

Why it matters

This is a different deal from the $1.02 billion Apollo put into Starwood REIT’s national affordable housing joint venture two days earlier, though the timing underscores the same appetite: institutional capital is still chasing income-restricted product even as new construction stalls under high rates. Starwood is buying, not recapitalizing, and it is buying at the neighborhood level in Miami-Dade rather than assembling a national portfolio. For sponsors and smaller owners of workforce and affordable stock in the county, a well-capitalized buyer like Starwood setting a fresh basis on 1980s-vintage-adjacent, LIHTC-era product raises the floor other bidders have to clear, and narrows the pool of income-restricted assets still available to trade at a discount.

The numbers

Magnolia Landing, at 25881 Southwest 143rd Court in Naranja, is a 150-unit, 20-building garden complex built in 2011 on 4.8 acres; Starwood paid $34 million, or about $226,660 per unit, and CBRE Capital Partners arranged a $23.8 million Freddie Mac loan on the property. Lafayette Square, a 160-unit, 19-story tower at 150 Northeast 79th Street in Little River built in 2008, traded for $29.75 million, or roughly $185,900 per unit. Gatehouse Group developed both properties and kept ownership of an adjacent 136-unit complex next to Lafayette Square.

What’s next

Gatehouse holding onto the adjacent Little River property means Starwood’s new tower will have next-door pricing and management comps almost immediately, a useful marker for anyone underwriting income-restricted assets in the neighborhood. In South Florida, where affordable and workforce supply lags population growth by a wide margin, a national buyer setting per-unit pricing in both a suburban Homestead-adjacent submarket and an urban Miami neighborhood in the same week gives other owners two fresh, geographically distinct comps to underwrite against, and one more reason to expect competition for income-restricted stock to stay tight through the rest of 2026.