Eight years and one chance meeting later, an Orlando developer inches toward groundbreaking on the $600 million hotel-condo St. Regis Longboat Key
An Orlando developer has secured a $48 million loan to fund a critical piece of the redevelopment of The Colony Beach Resort, a crown jewel property on Longboat Key.
With the loan from Centennial Bank in hand, Unicorp National Developments Inc. now has the funding in place to acquire the remaining unit shares of The Colony, which sits on 17 acres on the Gulf of Mexico. Though the physical buildings on the site were demolished in 2018, some of the condo owners still own shares of the property.
The acquisition of those shares is another piece of a complex redevelopment project that’s been in the works since 2012, when Unicorp president Chuck Whittall first looked at the property. The Colony, a legendary hotel-condo where President George W. Bush spent the night before the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, has been mired in litigation and multiple bankruptcies since 2008.
In place of The Colony, Unicorp plans to build the St. Regis Longboat Key Resort, a $600 million project which will include 69 condominiums and 166 hotel rooms. About half of the condos have been reserved, and Unicorp is in the process of converting those reservations to contracts representing $200 million in sales, Whittall said. In condo sales, moving from reservation to contract requires a nonrefundable deposit.
The condos are priced from $2 million with an average price of $7 million.
The development is moving forward at an unprecedented time for Florida’s real estate market: The novel coronavirus has brought leisure travel to a halt, but luxury home sales are booming. The condominium portion of the project, Whittall said, makes the resort rooms possible. Construction loans for hospitality projects are all but dead as lenders re-evaluate their balance sheets and shy away from anything dependent on tourism.
“They’ve seen unbelievable presales that have really even shocked me in this market,” said Robby Barrows, commercial loan officer at Centennial Bank.
Whittall said he anticipates beginning construction in mid-2021. He wants to presell 60 percent of the condos and believes he’ll hit that benchmark in the first quarter.
“I believe we will get the debt, but we’ll have more equity in it than we would prefer,” Whittall said on a construction loan. “But I do believe the availability of the debt is tied to the condo project — if we didn’t have a condo and it was just the hotel, I think it’d be nearly impossible.”
For a property as storied as The Colony, it’s fitting that Whittall has his own tale about the project. Shortly after he began looking at the property, he struck up a conversation at The Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, with a woman wearing Lilly Pulitzer. Pulitzer’s bright floral patterns are de rigueur at The Masters, but the fashion designer died just a few days before the 2013 tournament, and Whittall remarked that the Lilly-clad woman must be sad.
“She said, ‘I’m wearing her clothes to celebrate her life,’” Whittall said. “And she said, ‘Where are you from?’ And I said Florida, and she said, ‘Oh, we’re from Sarasota.’”
Whittall told the woman and her husband he was trying to buy a piece of beachfront property in the Sarasota area. When they learned it was The Colony, Whittall remembers that it felt like destiny.
“Her husband said, ‘I’m the bankruptcy attorney. Here’s my card.’”