Austin Business Journal writes, "LV Collective contends multifamily developers can learn a lot from the student housing world.
Student housing "is more innovative because when we start developing, our demographics are 14 (years old), and by the time we deliver, they're 18 or 19," said David Kanne, CEO of LV Collective, a national developer of both student and multifamily housing.
"We have to be thinking so far in the future that we are accustomed to constantly improving and dialing in, coming from that world," he said. "We force ourselves to think ahead … and because we have to get so far ahead of our consumer, we are always thinking way further ahead than most people that are doing the same product.”
Kanne made the comments while walking through what he considers a prime example — his company's recently opened mixed-use tower on Rainey Street downtown, called Paseo.
While the 48-story Paseo, located 80 Rainey St., is primarily an apartment tower, it has many more amenities than typical apartment buildings, including hotel rooms, upscale restaurants, bars, a future music venue and comfortable common areas to co-work, enjoy coffee or just hang out. The tower’s interiors, designed in-house by LV Collective Executive Vice President of Design and Curation Chelsea Kloss, are filled with live greenery, varied furniture pieces and wallpaper and paint choices that make the entire building feel more like a hospitality space than apartments.
“We have some great hospitality built in, where a lot of other products don’t have that unless it’s a hotel,” Kanne said. “When you compare us to any of those other properties, the offering is greater.”
Paseo's 498 apartments already are about 30% pre-leased, Kanne said, after pre-leasing began in August and the building officially opened in November. He said momentum continues to be strong, with more than 100 in-person tours in the tower’s first three weeks of being open.
Austin's multifamily market has been seeing a gradual drop in vacancy rates overall, with a reported vacancy rate of 13.7% in November, according to ApartmentData.com. That's down from 15.5% in April.
Paseo has studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments available with rates starting at about $2,200, though those rates are subject to change based on availability, Kanne said.
Those apartments, located in a district where residential towers are primarily condo buildings, have carved out an attractive niche.
“It's so expensive to buy, but if we can offer a better living experience that has lifestyle, views, unit design, hospitality, all at a much more affordable rate in the same area, then it's a pretty compelling story when you look at what a mortgage is,” said Kanne, whose company began site work on the project in early 2023.
In addition to its 498 apartments, Paseo has a 59-room hotel called Roost Rainey on floors 14 through 17, according to an announcement. The hotel rooms are essentially fully furnished apartments, meaning they can offer alternatives to traditional hotel or a short-term rental.
Still, the first thing most people notice at Paseo is the Daydreamer Coffee shop on the ground floor, which dominates the lobby with a circular coffee bar in its center, live plants and comfortable seating. Daydreamer is the first of a number of amenities at Paseo, and based on foot traffic into and out of it on a recent weekday afternoon, it’s already a popular addition to Rainey Street.
But LV Collective isn’t stopping at a coffee shop when it comes to amenities. It also is opening a Mediterranean-inspired rooftop bar and grill called Amaya on Paseo’s 12th floor. The restaurant is set to open Dec. 5 and is adjacent to an outdoor seating area and bar with a rooftop pool.
Hidden below Paseo in the basement is the site of a future 9,000-square-foot-plus music venue. The 300-person venue is still just a shell, but Kanne said he hopes to see it open in nine months to a year.
Other notable amenities include another rooftop pool on the 48th floor, a martini bar, a two-story fitness center and two floors of co-working space.
If that sounds like a lot to pack into an apartment building, it is. Kanne said one of the most difficult aspects of the development involved planning out how all of the different pieces fit together.
“Take the hospitality side,” Kanne said. “There’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes, like a reloading dock, storage, locker rooms, infrastructure. It’s much more in-depth than you realize, and going behind the scenes on logistics and coordination and all of the things you’re not usually focusing on, there were a lot of lessons learned there,” especially since LV Collective hadn’t done a hotel concept before.
He noted that coordinating the elevator system for all of the tower’s uses was difficult task. Paseo has five main elevators.
“Then you have a loading dock with the freight elevator that has to go all of the way up and down, with all these different entry points to get to event space and restaurant space,” he said. “Getting a commercial kitchen on level 12 in a building is not easy — just getting the hoods in was a challenge. So vertical transportation is never easy.”
Meanwhile, LV Collective is trying to ensure that some fabric remains of the old Rainey Street, which had been a quiet residential area before it was rezoned for skyscraper development in the mid-2000s.
A pair of bungalows at the Paseo property that had been turned into bars have been moved to a new location at the southern end, where they're being transformed into restaurant space. Kanne said one of them could become an oyster bar.
Directly across the street from Paseo, LV Collective leases several street-level properties where its hospitality division operates businesses like Side Piece Pies. The developer hopes that properties such as those avoid redevelopment, because they help keep a focus on the street level, Kanne said.
To that end, Michael Hsu Office of Architecture has been tasked with helping “stitch the fabrics” of the street-level properties together, Kanne said. LV Collective has funded installation of lights on trees throughout the street, not just at its own properties, to help improve the area as Rainey Street emerges from years of disruptive construction.
Likewise, LV Collective has coordinated with other property owners to centralize trash cans and dumpsters in the district. They're now more tucked away in alleyways so as not to become eyesores."
Source: Austin Business Journal
Written by: Cody Baird
Published: December 2, 2025
Posted by Grossman & Jones Group on
Leave A Comment