50-plus story Riverwalk Place in downtown Tampa to return deposits, looks to bring in a hotel flag
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Mar 13, 2020

The developer of Riverwalk Place in downtown Tampa says it is returning deposits for condominiums in the 50-plus story tower — and it is now in discussions with a hotel flag for a portion of the tower.

Two Roads Development, which this week parted ways with Feldman Equities, the tower's original developer, on Friday sent a letter to reservation holders, notifying them that the company is in "formal negotiations" with a hotel operator.

The tower is proposed at Ashley Drive and Brorein Street, directly on the Tampa Riverwalk. It is the last undeveloped parcel of waterfront land in downtown Tampa. The site was long known as the Trump Tower site after a Trump-licensed condo tower was pitched for the property in 2005. Those plans ultimately crashed along with the real estate market, and Tampa's Trump Tower never came to fruition.

The condos ranged from $600,000s to $2 million under the previous marketing and pricing. Two Roads did not offer any new information on pricing or a potential time frame for beginning construction but said "additional planning and design for the branded hotel and residences will take some time."

"While we will retain your reservation and wish to maintain this relationship with you, we are going to make arrangements with the escrow agent and the sales team to return your reservation deposit you made originally," the developer, based in West Palm Beach, wrote in the letter signed by managing partner Reid Boren.

The last public figure for reservations was $90 million, which the developers said on the tower's social media channels in May 2019.

Smith & Associates, which has the listing for the condos, will reach out to buyers on Monday. The Riverwalk Place development team halted reservations in mid-2019, saying it was to redesign the floor plans after ditching plans for office space in the tower in late 2018.

Riverwalk Place will now contain branded condominiums and hotel rooms. Tampa's first branded residences, The Edition, is under construction in Water Street Tampa. The Edition broke ground speculatively, without preselling any condos. Its developer, Strategic Property Partners, is controlled by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and Cascade Investment LLC.

Adding hotel rooms to Riverwalk Place will likely decrease the number of condos in the tower, which will make it easier to presell the number of units necessary to break ground. Developers typically look to sell about 60 percent of the condos in a building before breaking ground to satisfy the requirements for most construction loans. To reserve a unit, buyers put down a refundable deposit; for $1 million condos, $25,000 is a typical reservation amount. As construction begins, the developer converts reservations to contracts, and buyers put down nonrefundable down payments.

The number of residential units in Riverwalk Place ballooned to 288 after Two Roads and Feldman scrapped plans for seven stories of office space in the tower. By comparison, most of the million-dollar condo towers proposed or under construction between downtown and South Tampa have fewer than 100 units.

When Feldman originally proposed the tower in 2015, it was among the first condominiums to be proposed this real estate cycle. The original vision of Riverwalk Place included more than 200,000 square feet of office space and luxury condos. But by 2017, Feldman was entangled in a legal battle with its first partner on the project, Tampa's Intown Group, and projects that were proposed after Riverwalk began to gain traction in their presale campaigns and move toward a breaking ground.

There are now more than 1,000 luxury condos proposed between the Westshore Marina District and Water Street Tampa.