Polk apartment sale smashes record at more than $300K per door
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Mar 24, 2022

A newly built luxury apartment complex in Polk County has sold for more than $300,000 per unit — crushing the county's record sales price that was set last spring.

Lirio at Rafina, a 280-unit in Davenport near Championsgate, sold to Atlanta-based Preferred Apartment Communities Inc. for $90 million in late February, according to Polk County property records. The seller was Catalyst Development Partners, which broke ground on the complex in August 2020.

Monthly rents for a 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in Liro start at $1,545, according to the property's website.

The property is adjacent to Verso Luxury Apartments, which sold for $57.75 million in April 2021. At $231,000 per apartment, the sale of Verso was a record price-per-unit for Polk County. Both apartment properties are next to Ovation Town Center, a 96,750-square-foot Publix Super Markets Inc.-anchored shopping center.

In Tampa, a market-rate apartment complex first sold for more than $300,000 per unit in 2014. The Tampa Bay area did not see a sale of that magnitude again until 2018, when a tower in downtown St. Petersburg sold for more than $354,000 per apartment.