Written by: Bob Moser, Contact Writer, GrowthSpotter
When Winter Park-based MMI Development broke ground this month on a 272-unit first phase of Marden Ridge Apartments in Apopka, Michael E. Wright allowed himself a brief sigh of relief.
He’d spent the past four years scaling a political mountain and charting new territory for local infrastructure development to get to this point. All for the privilege to develop 114 landlocked acres that one of the nation’s top homebuilders had discarded, and to build a highway interchange on his own dime, with the hope surrounding growth would reimburse him.
As GrowthSpotter detailed in Part I of this Anatomy of a Deal series, Wright saw potential during the depths of the recession in Maitland and Apopka property that most deemed undevelopable. He’d bank more than $7.1 million on deeds alone, and commit millions more to public infrastructure, driven in part by a desire to prove naysayers wrong.
In Part II below, we pick up in 2013, when Wright would get a glimpse into Apopka’s future and move quickly to invest.
Read the rest of this story at GrowthSpotter, which details how Wright identified value-add land in Apopka, formulated a plan with local government for new infrastructure, and found a new multi-family partner in Ohio.
