Vacant for a decade, now 362 fully leased apartments

For more than a decade the Hollywood Bread Building at 1770 S. Young Circle stood empty, a landmark gone quiet on a corner with an ArtsPark view. BTI Partners and Bridge Investment Group bought it in June 2021, demolished it, and opened 362 apartments over 15,407 square feet of ground-floor retail, a building fully leased by opening day with Walgreens in the first storefront and a rooftop pool, fitness center, and co-working space above.

The land cost $11 million, and a year later the partnership secured $83 million in construction financing from Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Against those units, the two disclosed outlays work out to roughly $260,000 a door, with the true all-in number higher once soft costs and any equity beyond the land are counted, an arithmetic that shows a sponsor bought the dirt cheap and let a bank carry the build.

Bridge is the scaled half of the pairing, running $49.3 billion in regulatory assets across 610 employees, a platform far larger than a single 362-unit infill project requires; the structure — local developer, national manager, bank debt — is the version of South Florida infill that has been clearing, and its economics rest entirely on the land number staying small.

The Hollywood opening shows how apartment supply is getting financed in 2026: the apartment trade has split — agency capital marks down while new equity pays full basis for the right product — and BTI and Bridge sit on the favorable side of that split because the basis was set four years before completion, with the construction risk sitting at CIBC rather than with a fund that needed the yield.

Set that against the $130 million Phoenix bridge this publication covered in September, where private credit is financing the lease-up window and pricing the gap between completion and stabilization into a reserve. Bank debt plus a pre-leased opening is the cheaper version of the same trade, and it is available only to sponsors already holding land bought before the market repriced.

The next trade on Young Circle is the one to watch: if a vacant parcel there clears the same price, the window BTI walked through has closed.