Tommy DobczykOpportunity Zone Advisor, OZ Wizard · Director of Development | Certified Opportunity Zone Advisor

From Vacant Lot to Luxury Townhomes: A Real Estate Win #shorts

28 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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Tommy Dobczyk and partners are reviving a stalled Tempe development: a 5.3-acre industrial lot that was supposed to become 65 luxury apartments worth $30 million. A $14 million deal collapsed in COVID. Now they're buying it with owner financing, keeping the trucking tenants for three years, and using an opportunity zone to preserve $35 million in tax benefits for a $72 million luxury townhome project.

Are you in the deal room?
Space located in Tempe, you know where it's at. They were— it's a county island literally right next to where they're building the 600 units, uh, for Broadway. So this 5.3 that zigzags through there currently is industrial vacant crap, right? And Tempe in 2019, right, pre-COVID, they had it set up for annexation, uh, rezoning and how many units? 65? Luxury unit apartment. 65 luxury unit apartment valued, you know, exceeding $30 million, right? COVID came, kicked their butt, couldn't close, no annexation. It's been sitting dormant literally since 2019 with a $14 million LOI on it. So we're working on it now, looking at possibly picking it up, doing owner financing with a 50% LTV where we give the guy $6 million, we owner finance the other rented out his industrial space to truckers for the next 3 years, put it into an opportunity zone, saved the $35 million and bring it out of the ground with $72 million is what she was counting on.
Sweet. I like it. She did that. That girl. That's it. Nice work. First deal. Nice work.
Thank you. And I started invest— or real estate investing 3 weeks ago. In the deep end.
She did that. I was getting bored. I'm gonna go find something.
Let's go.