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Starting in the last half of 2008, Brookwood Value Partners LLC, an affiliate of the Beverly, Mass.-based private equity firm Brookwood Financial Partners LP, started buying up hundreds of home lots in Cape Coral, Lehigh Acres, Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda totaling more than $14 million. But since October, Brookwood has only bought a single deal, a 75-lot parcel in Bella Vida for $81,764.
They aren't alone. While short sale smaller residential have been gaining steadily, larger, big-ticket land sales have virtually dried up in Southwest Florida.
Since the end of the year there have only been two large-scale, multi-million dollar land sales in Lee and Collier counties, according to Randy Thibaut, owner and CEO of Fort Myers-based Land Solutions Inc. The two sales were the
Palmira Golf and Country Club, which was purchased by club-members for $2.1 million, and the Quail West Golf and Country Club, which was sold out of bankruptcy for $13.5 million. Thibaut credits the lack of sales mainly to continued uncertainty in the market.
“There is still plenty of capital waiting to be invested, but people are waiting for further confirmation of what the world is going to look like,” he says. “People are hesitant to invest in real estate, until they know a little more about capital tax gains and other tax increases.”
With Brookwood, Thibaut describes the change in position as not a pull back but additional caution and an extension of the time in which it expects to buy.
“I'm hearing 'We still want to buy, but not today,'” Thibaut says.
Either way expect to add a third transaction to that list of large sales next month. The undeveloped Lochmoore Country Club in North Fort Myers is scheduled to by auction off on April 14 to recover as much as possible of the more than $94 million Minneapolis-based Marshall Investments Corp. loaned to developer Paradise Preserve.
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