Rexmere Village in Davie plans expansion of manufactured housing – So Florida Business Journal
The owners of the Rexmere Village manufactured housing community in Davie filed plans to expand onto an adjoining property.
While many manufactured and mobile home communities in South Florida are being redeveloped into traditional apartment complexes or for-sale townhouses, the owners of the 150-acre Rexmere Village at 11296 Rexmere Blvd. are committed to staying in the business for the long haul, property owner Bonnie Dale said.
“This has been a labor of love for us over these years,” Dale said. “We did a great job in upgrading these houses and making them feel like a typical house. When you go into them, you don’t see any difference between this and a real house.”
Located on the west side of Hiatus Road, just south of Interstate 595, Rexmere Village has 774 homes. The residents own their manufactured homes and pay Rexmere Village monthly to lease the lots where they are located. The community also has amenities, such as a pool, putting green, lake, tennis courts, and shuffleboard courts. It’s more than 50 years old, but many of the homes are newly manufactured.
In 2019, Rexmere Village affiliate Rexmere Woods acquired a vacant site of 18.9 acres directly south of the property from FPL for $1.7 million. Attorney Tara Duhy, who represents Rexmere Village, said FPL previously planned the site as a substation but decided not to move forward with those plans.
Rexmere Village has asked the town of Davie to rezone the property from agricultural to residential and approve some waivers to allow less distance between homes, which would lead to the development of 75 standalone manufactured homes. Homes in the Reserve at Rexmere would range from 1,600 square feet with three bedrooms to 2,000 square feet with four bedrooms. They would be listed for under $200,000 – a price unheard of for a new single-family home in Broward County – although the homeowners would have to lease the land from Rexmere Woods.
Duhy said this project is crucial to address the lack of affordable housing in Davie.
“It’s a great joy for us to build housing in our town for police, firemen, and teachers, as well as retirees,” Dale said.
Dale added that newly built manufactured homes are designed to withstand hurricanes.
The home lot sizes in the Reserve at Rexmere are consistent with what exists in neighboring Rexmere Village, however, the rules in that part of Davie for single-family homes require fairly large lot sizes, Duhy said. The single-family home community directly south of the Reserve at Rexmere site has lots of at least one acre per home, a size that makes building affordable housing practically impossible.
Duhy noted there would be a landscaped buffer between the Reserve at Rexmere and the neighboring single-family homes, plus the traffic to the new community would go directly onto Hiatus Road.
The property owners filed the rezoning application about a year ago, and recently resubmitted it after receiving feedback from the community. Duhy hopes to secure a hearing date with the town later this year.
By Brian Bandell