Winter Haven sits in the middle of Central Florida's Polk County, between Tampa and Orlando on the Interstate 4 corridor, in a logistics, healthcare, and education economy that has grown steadily while its housing stock has not. On 3rd Street SW, a 330-key mid-century hotel spent its last years as a fading roadside property. Today it is The Jade: 238 apartments, leased, stabilized, and refinanced. This is how the conversion worked.
What was the property before the conversion?
A 330-key hotel built for a Florida tourism pattern that had long since moved to the coasts and the theme-park corridor. By acquisition, the property was functionally obsolete as hospitality: an aging format competing against newer flags for a shrinking pool of guests, on a site whose real value (location, acreage, structure, utilities) its hotel cash flows no longer reflected. That mismatch is the conversion entry point. The building was purchased on the economics of a struggling hotel rather than the value of the 238 homes it could become, and the site's fundamentals, a built structure on a serviced parcel in a housing-short county, carried through unchanged.
How did the hotel become 238 apartments?
The conversion consolidated and rebuilt 330 hotel keys into 238 residential units, studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments, replacing interiors, systems, and finishes while the structure, site, and infrastructure carried over. Hospitality spaces were converted to resident amenities: clubhouse lounge, conference room, pool, and landscaped grounds. The work was executed with in-house sourcing and project management, the model STILL Property Group now applies across the Jade program, backed by the conversion practice of its affiliate The Hutton Group, active since 1992. Scope stayed controlled because the heaviest costs of ground-up development (land, structure, parking, utilities) were already in place. The budget went to what residents live in and touch instead of excavation and steel.
What is The Jade Winter Haven today?
The Jade Winter Haven is a stabilized Class A apartment community at 1150 3rd Street SW in Winter Haven, Florida. Residents lease studios and one- and two-bedroom apartments with fully rebuilt interiors, and share amenities converted from the hotel's hospitality spaces: a resort-style pool and amenity deck, a clubhouse lounge with co-working and conference space, and landscaped grounds. The community serves Winter Haven's working households, the I-4 corridor's healthcare, logistics, and education workforce, with attainable Class A product that ground-up construction has not delivered to this submarket. The property operates under the Jade brand, STILL Property Group's residential communities platform, alongside the conversions that follow it in the program's pipeline.
What happened at stabilization and refinancing?
After completion, the community leased up and reached stabilized operations, and STILL Property Group refinanced the property. In the conversion model, refinancing at stabilization is the proof point: a lender underwrote the completed community on its actual rent roll and operating history, validating the conversion basis with third-party capital. Refinancing also demonstrates the model's full arc: acquire below replacement cost, convert, lease, stabilize, and return capital without depending on a sale into favorable market timing. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and individual project outcomes vary. Winter Haven executed each step of the playbook the Jade program is built on.
What does Winter Haven prove for the Jade program?
That the conversion playbook (acquire an obsolete hotel below replacement cost, convert in months rather than years, lease to real demand, stabilize, refinance) executes end to end in a Florida secondary market. The same playbook now drives The Jade Space Coast on Merritt Island, where a 128-room hotel is converting into 164 apartments minutes from Kennedy Space Center, and it anchors the pipeline behind Jade Residential Fund I. Winter Haven is the completed, refinanced, physical proof that the math in our thesis describes a repeatable process.
Explore the full track record, including four decades of Hutton Group conversion case studies.
Sources
- STILL Property Group, Offering Memorandum