The property is the 14-story, 1,500-room Rosen Shingle Creek Resort being built on 230 acres in south Orlando at an estimated hard construction cost of $300 million, area hotel brokers familiar with the Rosen brand tell GlobeSt.com. The resort, located off Universal Boulevard, will have 250,000 sf of meeting and exhibit space when it opens in late 2006. The meeting rooms will have 36-foot-high ceilings.

The Rosen hotel will be competing with regional convention hotels such as the Gaylord Palms in nearby Kissimmee and the adjoining Swan and Dolphin hotels at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista. Gaylord Palms has 400,000 sf of meeting space; Swan-Dolphin hotels, 329,000 sf. Nearby is the four-million-sf Orange County Convention Center.

Rosen couldn't be reached by GlobeSt.com's publication deadline. But area brokers tell GlobeSt.com Rosen is trying to build the project at about $200,000 per room--considered below the prevailing hard construction costs for comparable luxury properties. The hotel will have a 95,000-sf, column-free ballroom, 55,000-sf of breakout rooms and 30 hospitality suites.

Rosen Hotels & Resorts owns and operates six other resorts in Central Florida totaling 6,500 rooms and suites. In January, Rosen opened the 151,000-sf University of Central Florida's Rosen School of Hospitality Management at a development cost of $28.1 million or about $186 per sf. Harris Rosen and his wife Trisha donated $18.2 million to the project and pledged $1.1 million for scholarships to students attending the school.