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Three of downtown Lakeland’s landmark apartment properties — representing a major share of the city’s urban housing — are up for sale.
Lake Mirror Tower, NoBay, and The Gardens include 223 apartments and several retail spaces. All are owned by Broadway Real Estate Services and sit within about 0.8 miles of each other around Lake Mirror and the downtown core.
The properties were developed as part of a city-backed push for downtown housing that included a mix of public incentives, policy changes, and private risk.
Now, the three pioneering developments are being marketed to large investors as “institutional-quality” assets with 95.5% occupancy — a sign that the strategy has worked, and downtown has become a desirable place to live for many renters.
The properties were listed as a single portfolio on Jan. 28 by CBRE’s Tampa office. Interested buyers must sign confidentiality agreements to learn more, including the asking price.
Why sell now?
City officials say they don’t see the sale as a red flag or an owner retreating from downtown, but rather a sign that the market has changed from speculative to steady.
After a decade of high risk and high reward, Broadway could be looking to take its wins and hand the properties off to an institutional investor interested in steady long-term growth.
“I think this is a decision by one owner,” said Valerie Vaught, manager of Lakeland’s Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). “These are great properties… I do think they perform well.”
Vaught said the city’s past investments are largely complete, so it has no role or say in the sale of the three downtown properties.
There are still a few years remaining on the 10-year tax-increment financing incentives for The Gardens, but those benefits would not transfer to a new owner without City Commission approval. Broadway has not requested that change.
Broadway is also selling a fourth multifamily property — the 60-unit Woodland Heights community at 3726 Cleveland Heights Blvd — and three peripheral office buildings and some vacant lots.
However, it appears to be keeping several prominent downtown commercial buildings, including the McKay Building, Century Plaza, SunTrust Plaza, and the Herring-Bowyer Building at Kentucky and Pine.
A market that didn’t always work
Downtown housing didn’t always make financial sense.
A 2017 presentation to the City Commission laid out the problem. Rents were often too low to support construction costs. Lakeland’s population and income levels lagged behind larger cities. And building at higher densities was expensive.
The three properties came together in different ways, but all relied on significant public incentives, policy changes, and a cost-conscious developer willing to bet that downtown living would catch on.
Today, they are likely worth well above the roughly $3.6 million in incentives and subsidies the city offered and approximately $22 million Broadway invested to get them off the ground.
What might they be worth now?
Public records offer a baseline — but not the full picture.
The Polk County Property Appraiser assigns each property a “just market value,” a tax estimate intended to approximate market value. However, they are often very conservative and slow to reflect rising prices, reflecting the lowest end of a property’s value.
Current property appraiser estimates are:
- Lake Mirror Tower: about $9.4 million
- NoBay: about $1.9 million
- The Gardens: about $10.6 million
Another way properties are often valued is by price per square foot, though the range can vary significantly by location, condition, and amenities.
According to the sale listing, the properties include:
- Lake Mirror Tower: 91,483 square feet
- NoBay: 53,487 square feet
- The Gardens: 100,000 square feet
At $175 per square foot, the portfolio would be worth roughly $43 million ($16 million, $9.4 million, and $17.5 million respectively).
At $250 per square foot, that rises to about $61 million ($22.9 million, $13.4 million, and $25 million respectively).
Looking at it a third way, the 300-unit Bridgewater Grand community in northeast Lakeland sold for $57.4 million in July 2025 — an average price of about $191,300 per unit for apartments that are larger, but in a less valuable location.
If the downtown properties were to sell at roughly $200,000 per unit, excluding the retail spaces, the portfolio would be worth $44.6 million.
Part of Broadway’s value proposition is that its 95.5% occupancy rate is higher than typical industry averages, and rents are generally lower than those of competing properties.
How downtown housing went from risky to reliable
Downtown Lakeland’s apartment market didn’t emerge naturally. A decade ago, demand was uncertain, and it wasn’t clear that any apartment project could generate enough rent to succeed.
Housing was built in stages, as the city and developers tested whether rents could support construction costs.
Matthew Clark, a millennial lawyer-turned-developer and president of Broadway Real Estate, was a key partner in the city’s efforts to add downtown housing. The Lakeland native was just 36 when he negotiated a 2015 deal to take over the financially distressed, overleveraged Lake Mirror Tower Apartments at a discount.
Lake Mirror Tower: The eight-story historic building began as the New Florida Hotel, constructed in 1925 during Florida’s land boom. It later became the Regency Tower, a declining retirement hotel.
By the early 2000s, the structure was “vacant, blighted and dilapidated,” facing an uncertain future. The city stepped in and found a developer willing to preserve it through a major adaptive reuse project in 2004–2005 — stripping it to its frame and rebuilding it as a 76-unit apartment building with a two-story parking garage, a pool, offices, common areas, and a ballroom. The renovation cost about $10.7 million.
However, the project struggled financially in the years that followed. In 2015, owner TCG Regency Associates owed $3.1 million on a first mortgage held by a private lender and $4.75 million on a second mortgage held by the city.
Balloon payments were coming due, but city staff acknowledged, “The total amount of the indebtedness exceeds the market value of the property.”
That’s when Clark stepped in. Broadway Real Estate Services purchased the first mortgage from the lender and reached out to the city. Rather than risk deeper losses, Lakeland assigned its position to Broadway for $2.2 million — roughly $2.5 million less than what it was owed.
Broadway’s next step was more speculative.
NoBay: In 2014, the city issued a request for proposals to redevelop a surface parking lot on Bay Street into housing. Broadway beat out two other firms.
The city sold the land for $265,345, waived fees, and approved incentives expected to total about $500,000. Project costs were estimated at $5 million to $5.5 million.
Even with that support, the project was a stretch.
City staff pushed for features like balconies, varied facades, brick construction, and structured parking. But those upgrades would have driven costs beyond what rents could support.
The result was a more cost-conscious design.
“In order to foster a more vibrant downtown community, Downtown Lakeland is in dire need of residential infill development,” Clark wrote in a letter to the CRA Advisory Board. “We view NoBay as the first domino that will support a catalytic movement for redeveloping our Downtown into a thriving residential community where all of Lakeland will want to come to live, work and play.”
NoBay opened in 2016 with 55 units — 22 one-bedroom apartments and 33 two-bedroom townhomes — along with 11 retail spaces totaling about 5,730 square feet along Kentucky Avenue.
The Gardens: When Broadway proposed The Gardens a few years later, the concern wasn’t too little demand, but too much supply.
Mirrorton had recently broken ground, with plans to deliver more than 300 units, and a development on Oak Street that later fell through was expected to yield about 200 more.
“This flooding of the Downtown market with additional inventory will soften the market and lower rental rates,” Clark wrote as he sought incentives.
Broadway assembled about 1.3 acres through two land purchases in 2018, totaling roughly $430,000 and built the 90-unit project for about $10.6 million.
The city approved a tax-increment financing agreement projected at about $483,000 over 10 years.
The project faced scrutiny from Lakeland’s Historic Preservation Board, reflecting concerns about scale and compatibility near historic neighborhoods.
The biggest risks were construction costs and whether rents would be high enough to make the numbers work.
Then came the rent surge — and stabilization
The turning point came after the pandemic.
By 2022, rents in Lakeland’s downtown ZIP code were rising faster than anywhere else in the city, jumping nearly 20% in a single year.
The feared oversupply never materialized. New units were absorbed. Demand held.
Over the past couple of years, rent growth has slowed and stabilized.
What once looked uncertain now looks predictable — not just in Lakeland, but regionally.
In its 2026 outlook, CBRE wrote that labor market challenges and inflation will slow rent increases, so apartment operators will focus on keeping existing tenants. However, “barriers to homeownership will continue to support multifamily demand.”
In the short term, new construction might soften demand. For example, Valencia at the Park added 32 units downtown. Prospect Lake Wire, west of downtown, has already delivered about 300 of 630 planned units.
But construction has slowed due to inflation and supply challenges. Over the long term, CBRE expects multifamily housing in Central Florida to “outperform” thanks to people continuing to move here and new jobs — such as Publix’s downtown IT campus and Orlando Health and Watson Clinic’s new hospital.
Ultimately, the question will be whether a buyer agrees.
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The real reason is the heyday for real estate is going south. The city is getting out of their ownership while the getting is good. The out-of-control growth in real estate is slowing down in a hurry. Happening all over the state. Polk County is no longer the fastest growing county in the nation. In fact Lakeland had one of the highest foreclosure rates as of Feb 2026. Ranked in the top 5 cities with populations over 200,000. You can find this information on the net. Yet large residential and apartment complexes keep getting approved by city-county commissioners. Tampa currently has the highest foreclosure rate in the country.