Aspirant Development Breaks Ground on Revelry, a $288 Million Pair of Towers in Tempe

Tempe’s skyline just picked up two more towers in the making. Aspirant Development, the luxury urban infill division of Empire Group of Companies, broke ground on Monday, September 28 on Revelry, a $288 million, 533-unit high-rise apartment community near Arizona State University. The groundbreaking came right on the heels of a $229 million construction loan from Mavik, arranged by Malcolm Davies and Kyle McDonough of WAY Capital.

The project

Revelry rises near the southeast corner of Rural Road and University Drive as two towers, one at 17 stories and one at 15, totaling roughly 850,000 square feet. The 533 residences will include a mix of furnished and unfurnished units, and the project adds about 16,300 square feet of retail. Gensler is the architect and Layton is the general contractor.

The amenity program is built for resort-style living, with more than 100,000 square feet of amenity space in all. Highlights include a 27,000-square-foot pool deck shared by the two towers, a clubhouse with spa and fitness center, a two-lane bowling alley, pickleball courts, a sauna, cold plunge, and aromatherapy rooms, a yoga terrace, a golf simulator, an arcade, a dog spa, co-working space, and a coffee bar.

Randy Grudzinski, a partner at Empire, said the company aims to deliver “the most elevated of residential experiences within highly valued, walkable urban core locations.” Mike Fishbein, a managing director at Mavik, called Revelry “a compelling new addition to the Tempe market.”

Why it matters to JFN

Two high-rise towers sharing one large amenity deck are about as demanding as multifamily plumbing and mechanical work gets. At 15 and 17 stories, domestic water has to be split into pressure zones with booster systems, and hundreds of stacked wet walls repeat floor after floor, which rewards prefabrication and tight sequencing. Then there is the amenity level: a 27,000-square-foot pool deck, a spa, a sauna and cold plunge, and a fitness center each bring their own water treatment, heating, drainage, and ventilation loads, all coordinated with the retail space below and around them. A fully financed project of this size breaking ground in Tempe is great news for the whole Arizona building community, and we congratulate the Aspirant, Gensler, and Layton teams on getting it out of the ground.

Sources: Commercial Observer, September 28, 2026; Connect CRE, October 1, 2026; AZBEX, October 2, 2026; AZ Big Media, January 31, 2026