Page 25 - Green Builder May-June 2017 Issue

At Florida’s award-winning
22-26 GB 0517 Eco-Smart.indd
Quaye communities, there’s
always room for more green.
BY ALAN NADITZ HEN RICK LOCOCO AND HIS PARTNERS at
W FM Contract Services decided to build a truly
green luxury rental apartment complex, they
took a simple approach: If at first you succeed,
do it again. And again. And again.
By early summer, FM Contract Services will
have completed its third luxury apartment and townhome site in
Palm Beach County, Florida. Like its two predecessors, Seabourn Cove
and The Quaye at Palm Beach Gardens, The Quaye at Wellington
offers its residents a wide range of sustainable products. All three
locations are built to National Green Building Standard ICC 700 Gold
Level. And occupants seem to love them, with developments leased
to capacity within a few months.
But they’re not quite perfect. And that’s a problem FMCS partner
Rick Lococo wants to solve the next time around. Or perhaps the
time after that.
“We’ll keep trying,” says Lococo, who served as project manager
for all three developments. “But so far, things have gone very well.”
Indeed. In 2013, Seabourn Cove won “Multifamily Project of the
Year” at the National Association of Home Builders Green Building
Awards. Earlier this year, The Quaye at Palm Beach Gardens was
recognized for “Best Amenities: Garden-Style Apartments” by the
South East Florida Apartment Association. It also received “Best
Green Project” in the South Florida Business Journal’s Structures
Awards competition.
And to think it started with an economic downturn.
A GRAND IDEA
In 2010, as the building industry crawled through the recession,
Lococo and partners Charles Funk and Jeff Meehan were considering
a way to attract new business at a time when people weren’t buying
much of anything. “That’s when we came up with the idea to design
a rental building that was 100 percent energy efficient,” Lococo says.
“We wanted a luxury rental place where the residents’ utility bills
would be zero.”
The project, which would become Seabourn Cove, consisted of
456 high-end rental units with every conceivable green product.
As planned, it would be the nation’s largest green multi-family
community. But the price tag topped $10 million, a figure that just
wasn’t viewed as realistic by anyone, according to Lococo.
FMCS self-funded the project. “We sat down and said, ‘Let’s allocate
X dollars to the project and see what we could do to bring down the
cost, and make it as sustainable as possible,’” he says. “We came up
with $4 million and made it work.”
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