Developer Offers South Florida Mobile Home Community $500 Million To Move Out
A Boca Raton real estate developer is offering to make millionaires of many mobile home owners in an oceanfront community. Yet some think what they have already is priceless.
Ocean Land Investments has offered $500 million for the town of Briny Breezes, a 42-acre piece of land between Palm Beach and Boca Raton. The mobile home community has 488 homes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It’s total appraised value? $42.3 million.
The firm wants to build condominiums priced up to $8 million, along with parks and a resort hotel. But it is meeting more opposition than you might think. Bill Tolford, whose parents paid $4,600 in the 1950s for two lots with clear ocean views, has been offered about $1.46 million to clear out. He may not accept. With tax implications, the final price and the timing, too much is up in the air.
“Where are you going to get what we have here?” asks the 81-year old retired optometrist from Portland, Maine. “You cannot duplicate it.”
The deal must be approved by 80 percent of the homeowners in Briny Breezes, a cooperative where some homes have been moved onto foundations. Others still rest on wheels. A vote may be held by the end of March, before many of the community’s part-time residents head north for the spring and summer. Tom Goudreau, 62, a part-year resident, has a $1 million offer on the table for a home he bought for about $50,000 two years ago.
“We like it here, and you can’t replace it. So you end up with $700,000 after taxes, and you buy a condo. The taxes will be higher, and you don’t have the community you have here,” he said.
The Florida population grew by 24 percent from 1990 to 2000, almost twice the rate of the overall U.S. That boom has the state’s housing market surging, with the median price of homes in the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton metropolitan area increasing more than 300 percent — currently, the median price is $390,100 — from 1995 to 2005, according to data supplied by the Florida Association of Realtors.
These factors mean that Briny Breezes — which residents just call “Briny” — a bit of a museum piece, an anachronism tucked amid the wealth that sprawls almost uninterrupted for 70 miles from Miami Beach to West Palm Beach. It began as a rent-as-you-go trailer park in the 1930s and turned into a cooperative by residents in the 1950s. Its board of directors consists of residents and is divided into four districts, each of which must approve the sale.
Ocean Land, meanwhile, was founded in 1995 by Jean Francois Roy, who rehabilitated old apartment complexes in his native town of Montreal. Working with the Related Group of Florida and other developers, Roy has torn down hotels and developed oceanfront condos across South Florida. Bulldozing Briny would be a devastating loss for many residents, which occupies a five-block stretch of Highway A1A, Florida’s coastal route.
“This is your family. The first thing I did when I heard the news was I ran to my friends down the street and said, ‘OK, where are we going?”’ said 71-yeard old Nancy Boczon, who lives in Clinton, N.J., the rest of the year. “I want to be with them no matter what gets decided. We’re close, and we do things together.”
That community feeling has been jeopardized by the offer, which was made public late last year.
“It’s a big family here, except for this year,” says Goudreau, a Maine car dealer who says he will vote no, even with a $1 million offer in hand. “They’ve split over people who want to sell and people who don’t want to. It’s not as friendly as it has been. Now, people are trying to sway people to sell or not to sell. If the land is worth this much now, it’ll be worth that much more in 10 years. But if the vote is to sell, we’ll take it and go. There’s nothing else we can do.”
With soaring real estate prices and South Florida land scarce, eager Florida real estate developers have put increased pressure on mobile home owners. Even permanent residents of boats have been squeezed as housing costs continue to escalate. In fact, Florida home loans have been so affordable that prices have risen out of the range of young adults and the middle class. It will be interesting to see if the residents of Briny Breezes will accept the money, or whether they will remain one of the state’s last holdouts for years to come.
