In 2023, Metropolitan Naples ran its sales operation out of a small office at 365 Fifth Avenue South, tucked next to The French, the restaurant with the red awnings that most people driving through downtown Naples would recognize before they'd recognize the name of the project selling condos next door. At the time, the building those condos belonged to didn't exist. It was a rendering, a construction timeline, and a price sheet.
Five years later, that price sheet is the most useful document in this story, because it's the one thing about Metropolitan Naples that's changed on a schedule buyers can actually verify.
What the site actually is
Metropolitan Naples sits on 5.3 acres at the corner of Fifth Avenue South and Davis Boulevard, a parcel Collier County had targeted for redevelopment for more than two decades under the name Gateway Triangle before selling it to developers Fred Pezeshkan and Jerry Starkey. The plan, unchanged since the county approved it, is three 15-story towers, each with ground-floor restaurants and retail, structured parking tucked into the lower levels, and residences or office space stacked above. The pitch, in the words of the project's director of sales, Ed Gonzalez, is that residents can work, walk downstairs for lunch, and get a steak and a glass of wine without touching a car.
That pitch is easy to sell in a rendering. It's harder to deliver in the order a construction schedule actually allows, and the order matters more than the amenities list.
The price sheet, dated
Here's what the developer's own announcements say about the same building, Avra, at three points since 2021:
| When it was announced | What buyers were shown | Price range quoted |
|---|---|---|
| October 2021 | A 56-unit tower, still unbuilt, condos two to four bedrooms | $1.5 million to $4 million |
| January 2026 | The same 56-unit tower, months from its first residents | $2 million to over $7 million |
| April and May 2026 | The same tower, occupancy confirmed for fall 2026 | $2 million to $7 million |
The entry price moved from $1.5 million to $2 million. The top end moved from $4 million to $7 million. Nothing about the floor plans changed. What changed is that the tower went from a concept to a building people can now walk through, and the price sheet tracked that shift in real time.
This is the part a sales gallery won't frame as risk, because from where the developer sits it isn't risk, it's proof the bet worked. But for a buyer comparing Metropolitan Naples against an established Naples neighborhood, the lesson isn't that pre-construction pricing goes up. It's that the number on the price sheet the day you sign is a bet on a delivery date, and that delivery date at Metropolitan Naples has moved every year since the ground was cleared.
What's actually finished, right now
Only one of the three towers has residents in it today. Ascent, the first tower, began leasing in December 2024 and welcomed its first tenants in January 2025. It's a 270-unit apartment building with a coffee shop, a restaurant, and roughly 9,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, built and owned as a joint venture between The Dolben Company, GFI Development, and SK2 Capital. Dolben is a Massachusetts-based apartment operator with five generations of family ownership dating back to 1929, and it manages Ascent the way any large apartment company manages a rental building: professionally, at scale, with turnover built into the model.
Avra, the second tower, is the one with the price sheet history above. Its occupancy has been publicly confirmed for fall 2026, which puts its actual delivery right around now. The developer's own spring 2026 releases describe construction "progressing rapidly" with "a limited number of remaining residences," language that reads like confidence from inside the sales office and like a countdown from outside it.
The third tower doesn't have a name yet. As of a Naples Press report from late July 2026, it's still planned to include more condos alongside roughly 25,000 square feet of Class A office space, the piece of the project that would make Gonzalez's no-car pitch literal. It has no announced construction start date.
So the neighborhood the marketing describes, where you live in one tower, work in another, and eat downstairs without leaving the block, is currently one-third open, one-third about to open, and one-third still a floor plan.
The tenure split you're actually buying into
There's a structural detail here that matters more than the amenities list, and it doesn't show up in a walkthrough. Ascent is a rental building owned by an institutional apartment operator. Avra is a condominium, individually owned, floor by floor. The unnamed third tower will add more owned units on top of leased office space.
That means Metropolitan Naples isn't governed by one association making decisions for the whole 5.3 acres. A buyer at Avra is buying into Avra's ownership structure, not a single Metropolitan Naples board that also sets policy for the apartment tower next door. Your literal neighbors in Ascent answer to a property manager in Boston, not to a vote at your building's annual meeting. That's a normal feature of mixed-use, mixed-tenure developments, and it isn't a flaw. But it's a different governance reality than buying into an established Naples condominium building where every owner sits on the same association and has the same vote.
For a buyer weighing Metropolitan Naples against a resale unit in an existing Naples building, this is the actual comparison: an established building delivers a known governance structure and a known product today. Metropolitan Naples delivers a phased structure where the rental tower, the ownership tower, and the office tower each answer to different owners, on different timelines, indefinitely.
What's converging around it
None of this is happening in isolation. Across Davis Boulevard, London-based Henley Investment Management has proposed The Halcyon Residences & Marina, a $350 million, three-building complex with 66 luxury residences and a 120-slip marina, its groundbreaking currently anticipated for January 2027. A few blocks over, Encore Naples Square is finishing out its own 15-unit building on Third Street South, targeting completion in the fourth quarter of 2026. Naples Press has counted six separate luxury condo projects rising within a mile of Fifth Avenue South, adding up to 214 new residences, a 126-room hotel, and that 120-slip marina, all converging on the same few blocks at roughly the same time.
That convergence is the strongest argument for buying into this corridor now rather than waiting. It's also the reason no single project's completion date can be treated as fixed. When six large developments are competing for the same contractors, the same permitting staff, and the same construction labor pool in downtown Naples, a schedule slip in one building tends to ripple into the next.
The actual takeaway
Metropolitan Naples isn't a bad bet. The price history proves buyers who got in early on Avra are sitting on real appreciation, and the corridor around it is absorbing serious capital from multiple directions. But the number on a pre-construction price sheet here has never been a fixed quote. It's a snapshot of where the developer's timeline stood on the day it was printed, and that timeline has moved every time a new tower has gone from rendering to reality.
If you're comparing a pre-construction unit at Metropolitan Naples against a resale property in an established Naples neighborhood, the question worth asking isn't just what the square footage costs today. It's what you're underwriting if the third tower's office space, the one that makes the whole live-work-play pitch literal, doesn't break ground for another two years.
Frequently asked questions
Is Metropolitan Naples one homeowners association? No. Each tower has its own ownership and management structure. Ascent is an institutionally owned rental building. Avra is a standalone condominium association. The third tower will add its own structure once it's built.
What can I actually see if I visit Metropolitan Naples today? Ascent, open since January 2025, with its ground-floor coffee shop, restaurant, and retail space. Avra's tower is up and its first residents are moving in this fall. The third tower is still unbuilt with no announced start date.
How does this compare to buying in an older Naples building? An established building gives you a finished product and a single governing association on day one. Metropolitan Naples asks you to buy into a project still being delivered in phases, with different ownership structures in different towers, in exchange for a ground-floor position in one of downtown Naples' most active redevelopment corridors.
Weighing a pre-construction unit against something already built and finished is exactly the kind of decision that benefits from someone who tracks these projects tower by tower, not just listing by listing. Live in SWFL works with buyers across Naples every day who are asking this same question about different addresses. If you're trying to figure out what a price sheet like this actually means for your timeline, reach out and Start Your Success Story.
