A STORIED PROPERTY
Eight years and one chance meeting later, an Orlando developer inches toward groundbreaking on the $600 million hotel-condo St. Regis Longboat Key

By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Dec 4, 2020

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.