Entrada Paramount Opens 240 Apartments Into Soft Rents

BBL Building Company said on July 27, 2026, that it had finished Entrada, a 240-unit apartment community in northeast Cape Coral. The five four-story buildings, marketed to tenants as Entrada Paramount, sit at 3940-3990 Villa Del Mar Circle beside the gated Villages at Entrada subdivision.

The community is leasing with up to two months free on move-in, plus waived application and admin fees, as a $58.78 million construction loan heads toward a November 2026 maturity. That concession is the tell on the wager: the walls went up on time, and the market they opened into did not.

BBL Hands Over 240 Apartments in Northeast Cape Coral

Patrick Bette, vice president at BBL Building Company, credited the ownership group and trade partners for delivering the job. The Plano, Texas, contractor, part of the family-run Bette companies, ran the work from its Florida operation and has been posting site photos since the first slabs.

Entrada represents the dedication and craftsmanship that our project teams bring to every community we build. We are grateful to our ownership group, trade partners, and the entire project team for their collaboration and commitment throughout construction. Their efforts made the successful delivery of this community possible.

Patrick Bette, Vice President, BBL Building Company, July 27, 2026 completion announcement

The buildings use four stories of block-and-plank concrete across five apartment structures and a clubhouse, the same spec BBL described when construction started in June 2024. Asset Living is managing the lease-up. First residents were slated to move in around January 2026, after BBL said certificates of occupancy were close and property management was about to take the keys.

FROM LOAN CLOSE TO KEYS

1. May 2, 2024: Entrada Paramount LLC closes a 30-month, non-recourse construction loan with Trez Capital.
2. June 20, 2024: Local notices say work is underway, with a groundbreaking set for mid-July.
3. March 17, 2025: Clubhouse roof work nears an end, and Building 2 is in fourth-floor block.
4. October 23, 2025: All buildings are dried in, and Phase 1 turnover of the clubhouse and Building 2 is next.
5. December 15, 2025: BBL says building finals are done and the first residents arrive the following month.
6. July 27, 2026: BBL announces completion and says the community is leasing.

Phased turnover meant people were already living on site months before the contractor’s completion notice. That is normal on a five-building job. It also means the lease-up clock started well before the ribbon copy went out.

A $58.78 Million Loan Matures in November

The money behind the job is a Canadian lender’s ground-up bet on Class A rentals at the Porto Vista and De Navarra Parkway corner. Trez Capital lists a $58.78 million construction loan for a 240-unit garden-style complex on a 15-acre Cape Coral site, closed in May 2024.

David Otero of Miami’s Lending Bankers Mortgage arranged the debt for Entrada Paramount LLC. Deal records describe a 30-month, non-recourse construction loan on 240 units. Thirty months from May 2, 2024, puts maturity in early November 2026, about three months after BBL’s completion notice.

THE DEBT ON THE FIVE BUILDINGS

• The lender: Trez Capital provided ground-up construction financing, closed May 2024.
• The amount: $58.78 million on 240 units at 3940-3990 Villa Del Mar Circle.
• The term: 30 months, non-recourse, arranged by David Otero of Lending Bankers Mortgage.
• The maturity: Early November 2026, after a summer 2026 completion.

Non-recourse debt keeps the sponsor’s other assets off the hook if the lease-up misses its numbers. It does not freeze the calendar. Construction loans are built to be refinanced or paid off once the buildings are leased, and this one comes due while the community is still advertising free months to fill units.

Cape Coral Apartment Vacancy Stands at 25.8 Percent

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in its Cape Coral-Fort Myers analysis dated May 1, 2025, already told developers there was no net demand for new rentals through May 1, 2028. HUD’s analyst counted 8,700 rental units under construction and wrote that the vacant stock on hand was enough to cover household growth for three years.

To allow for the absorption of the current excess supply of vacant available units, no additional market-rate rental units should be constructed during the 3-year forecast period.

HUD analyst, Comprehensive Housing Market Analysis, Cape Coral-Fort Myers, as of May 1, 2025

HUD put the overall rental vacancy rate at 16.0% on May 1, 2025, and the stabilized apartment vacancy rate at 9.7% in the first quarter of 2025, with the average apartment rent at $1,861, down 3% from a year earlier. Those figures describe the metro before Entrada’s full delivery. The city’s later CoStar pull is worse at the Cape Coral submarket level.

Cape Coral’s Economic and Business Development Office, using CoStar data accessed on July 10, 2026, reported a Cape Coral multifamily vacancy of 25.8%. That reading is down from 30.7% in the January 2026 pull, a 4.9-point ease that still leaves more than one in four units empty. Fort Myers was at 18.9% on the same July table.

MULTIFAMILY VACANCY ON THE JULY 2026 COSTAR PULL

Nelson Taylor, vice president of market research at LSI Companies, said Lee County vacancy was 20.3% entering 2026, and that developers completed a record 4,330 apartment units in the county in 2025. “Everything we have is predicated on population growth,” Taylor said. “It just so happened that 15 other developers thought the same thing.”

Nick Gerli, chief executive of Reventure App, wrote in March 2026 that rental deflation was spreading across Florida and that Cape Coral, North Port, and Naples had apartment vacancies in the double digits. He also noted that two months free functions as an extra cut to net rent. That is the math Entrada Paramount is now doing in public.

Two Months Free Is the Lease-Up Offer

Entrada Paramount’s own leasing site, and apartment listing pages updated as recently as September 23, 2026, advertise up to two months free plus waived application and admin fees. The property account was already pushing that deal in February 2026, while the first building was still waiting on a certificate of occupancy and an Aldi had opened across Del Prado.

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The same concession is running at other new Cape Coral complexes. The Cove at 47th, a 327-unit community HUD listed as in lease-up in 2025, has offered two to three months free and a year of Cape Coral Bridge tolls. Flaherty & Collins, the Indianapolis developer on that job, built into the same vacancy swing, from record-low emptiness when the deal was struck to record-high emptiness when the units hit the street.

Free months are not a grand-opening flourish in this market. They are how Class A product clears inventory when asking rents on paper no longer match what tenants will sign. Listings that still carry the special in late September, two months after BBL’s completion notice, mean the 240 units are not filling at the printed rate.

What Renters Find Inside the New Buildings

Posted starting rents on the community’s site are $1,247 for the Gulfstream one-bedroom, $1,619 for the Seabreeze two-bedroom, and $2,699 for the Coral three-bedroom, with floor plans from 888 to 1,382 square feet. Those one-bedroom rents starting at $1,247 sit well below HUD’s $1,861 metro average from early 2025, which is the point of a lease-up in a soft market.

ENTRADA PARAMOUNT STARTING RENTS

Leases run 7 to 15 months. The site sells nine-foot ceilings, full-size washers and dryers, air-conditioned corridors, and concrete construction for sound and storm season. Reviews already on the page describe occupied homes, not a hard-hat tour, which matches BBL’s winter 2025-26 handover of the first building.

WHAT COMES WITH THE RENT

• The pool deck: A resort-style pool with canopy tents, a shaded pergola, an outdoor TV, grilling stations, and a tanning deck.
• The courts: On-site pickleball with no extra membership, plus a playground and gathering rooms.
• The buildings: Block-and-plank concrete, interior corridors, and in-unit laundry across the 240 homes.
• The errands: An Aldi at 3510 Del Prado Boulevard North, listed by the community as a walk-across-the-road grocery, with Sprouts and Coralwood Shopping Center nearby.

Pickleball, a clubhouse, and a pool are now table stakes on Gulf Coast Class A flyers. Concrete floors are the local extra. Cape Coral takes hurricane insurance and wind-borne debris as ordinary weather, and block-and-plank is the construction answer BBL put in the ground in 2024, when that still looked like a way to win tenants rather than a way to hold a loan.

The D.R. Horton Subdivision Next Door Sells Homes

Villages at Entrada is a gated D.R. Horton community of 721 homes on the Del Prado North corridor, with lakes and preserves, run as Village at Entrada HOA. The apartments were sited against that owner-occupied product on purpose: same master-plan name, different tenure, a clubhouse and pickleball on both sides of the fence.

That adjacency cuts two ways. Households that cannot or will not buy into the gated streets now have a new rental next door, which is the demand story the 2024 loan underwrote. Households that already own there now live beside a 240-unit lease-up that is paying people to move in, which is the 2026 version of the same story.

Cape Coral’s identity is still canals and single-family lots, the “Waterfront Wonderland” HUD’s report repeats. The 240 apartments do not change that map. They test whether a Class A rental, finished on a 30-month clock, can clear in a city whose own vacancy table still shows 25.8% of multifamily stock empty, and whether Trez Capital’s May 2024 paper gets refinanced before November without more free months on the board.

Listings dated September 23, 2026, still carry the two-month special. The loan still matures in November. The buildings are up.