“The sooner the better for us,” said Lasserre Bradley III, vice president of real estate development for The Ackermann Group.
Bradley said the complex will have an overall concept of “health and wellness and driving an active lifestyle,” noting the access to the 53-acre park, the regional bike path and a yoga area in the clubhouse.
Bradley said his firm needs to iron out issues before beginning construction and releasing rental rates. The project will be done in phases, he said, with the first one projected to be completed a year after construction starts and the second 18 months after it begins.
“With the growth being experienced at Austin Landing and with the amenity of the adjacent Waldruhe Park,” Bradley stated in an email Wednesday, “this location truly is a unique opportunity to meet the growing demand for this type of housing.”
Trustees on Tuesday night unanimously approved the residential portion of the project, estimated to cost between $20 million and $25 million. However, plans for the complex’s pool are not complete and will go before the township at a future date. The project’s green light follows the township’s approval last fall of The Flats at Austin Landing, an estimated $35 million project that will bring 274 upscale units in a four-story complex at the nearby 142-acre mixed-use development.
Developers had said they expected construction to begin by this spring. However, no zoning certificate has been requested yet for the project, according to Kyle Hinkelman, Miami Twp.’s deputy director of community development. Attempts to reach developers Wednesday were unsuccessful.
The 500 units planned in the vicinity of Ohio 741 and Austin Boulevard are more slightly more than the number of building permits for apartments in the entire Dayton region in the past three years, according to statistics used by the Homebuilders Association of Dayton.
Board President Doug Berry asked Bradley if the market would support the project, given the presence of the Austin Landing housing. Bradley he was confident that it would.
“We really looked at the demographic studies and the drivers of the potential demand,” Bradley said after the vote. “Both with the baby-boomer market aging and the millennials, we feel there’s a capacity in the market for it.”
The apartments at Austin Park will consume the majority of the nearly 15-acre development whose only announced business tenant thus far is Universal 1 Credit Union. With the apartments, plans call for more than 3 acres of green space surrounding eight buildings for housing, a clubhouse, a pool, a maintenance facility, and direct access to a regional bike path and Waldruhe Park, a preserve owned by the city of Dayton.
The complex will consist of 116 one-bedroom apartments and 100 two-bedroom dwellings in two- and three-story structures, plans indicate. Units will range from 765 to 1,262 square feet with an average size of 933 square feet, and the complex will be designed to incorporate the park, “a huge benefit,” Bradley said.
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