Newgard Group, the Miami-based developer led by founder and CEO Harvey Hernandez, has closed on a 2.6-acre site at 2500 North Florida Mango Road in West Palm Beach for $10.5 million, property records show, more than triple what the previous owner paid for the land in 2021. The site, a former 1950s bowling alley near Palm Beach International Airport, will become Palm Beach Auto Haus, a two-story, roughly 111,637-square-foot development with 20 individually owned automotive units. Amenities planned for the property include padel courts, a coworking lounge, a cafe, a gym, wellness and fitness facilities, and organized driving and racing experiences for members. The project is a notable departure for Newgard, a 25-year-old, vertically integrated development firm better known in South Florida for large residential and hospitality projects like Natiivo Miami, BrickellHouse, and the Gale Miami Hotel & Residences, and it marks the company’s first significant commercial project in West Palm Beach specifically, a market where most new developers have focused on waterfront luxury condos rather than a niche automotive concept. Hernandez tied the concept to a gap he’d identified in how serious car collectors are typically served, saying “for years I searched for a place that reflected the way passionate automobile enthusiasts” actually enjoy owning their collections.
The detail that actually separates this from an upscale parking garage or a private storage facility is the ownership structure, not just the amenity list. Each of the 20 automotive units at Palm Beach Auto Haus will be sold outright to individual buyers as deeded real property, the same legal structure as a residential condominium, rather than rented on a monthly basis the way most car-storage facilities operate. That distinction matters financially and legally: a buyer owns the unit as real estate, can theoretically resell or pass it down, and has an equity stake in the underlying building rather than a service contract that ends when they stop paying dues. It’s a meaningfully different value proposition from a typical valet-style exotic car storage business, which is essentially a monthly service fee with no underlying asset attached once a customer stops paying. Layered on top of that ownership structure is a membership-style community: shared amenity space, programmed social and driving events, and hospitality-grade design meant to make the building function as a clubhouse for people who happen to store cars there, not just a secure warehouse with nicer paint.
That combination, individually owned real estate plus club-style programming, is showing up in enough separate South Florida projects right now to look like a genuine emerging category rather than a single developer’s novelty concept. Newgard itself is already building a second, related project: Revault Miami, a 16-unit luxury car-storage condo and collector community in the city’s Little River neighborhood, developed with Imperial Moto and first announced last September. Beyond Newgard’s own pipeline, The Hangar at Regatta Harbour in Coconut Grove offers a similar private garage condo model for car collectors, and Auto Clubhouse in Jupiter combines individually owned luxury garage condos with private club programming of its own. Four distinct projects across the Miami-to-Jupiter corridor, developed by different teams, all converging on the same basic formula, is a stronger signal of a real category forming than any single announcement would be on its own…