GlobeSt.com UPDATE: Developers Plan $1B Mixed-Use Enterprise Near Convention Center

The developers' company, Fourth Quarter Properties XLIX LC, is shooting for a 2009 partial completion date on the project, even though contracts with national hotel players such as Hilton and Hyatt aren't yet buttoned down, area brokers tell GlobeSt.com. The venture, tentatively dubbed Orlando Glades, also plans to include a major promotional center on the property geared to attracting high-tech companies as tenants or land buyers.

The stakes are high in this undertaking for both the developers, land buyers, the city and the county, area industrial and resort brokers tell GlobeSt.com. If the city approves the annexation, it stands to gain about $120 million in tax revenue over the next six years, according to local independent planners and county staffers. That's the amount the county has been receiving from the land owners in annual property taxes and the amount it would be losing.

County chairman Rich Crotty, the county's former property appraiser, calls the city's annexation attempt "a financial land grab." His staffers tell GlobeSt.com the county will fight the city on the annexation issue. The city, likewise, is determined to have the project in its own backyard, largely because there are only 7,600 hotel rooms in the immediate Convention Center area.

The planned 10,000 new rooms would help the city attract larger and more prestigious events, city staffers tell GlobeSt.com. Hospitality industry sources estimate the metro area has a total 116,756 hotel and motel rooms, along with short-term rental properties.

On a separate front, Orange County property appraiser Bill Donegan has appealed an Orange Circuit Court judge's ruling that allows Watson and Thomas to keep an 'agricultural' zoning stamp on their 1,780 acres, largely because they are farming pine trees to aid the environment, as GlobeSt.com previously reported. That agricultural exemption has cost the county $1.4 million in tax revenue since the zoning dispute started in 2002, Donegan says. It has also saved Thomas-Watson thousands in property tax payments.

Meanwhile, two recently completed land deals could be affected by both the annexation and zoning exemption disputes, brokers following the project and the controversies tell GlobeSt.com.

In August, for example, Watson and Thomas sold Pulte Home Corp. of Bloomfield Hills, MI an 80-acre Universal Boulevard tract, within their 1,780-acre property, for $75.04 million, or $938,000 per acre, which equates to $21.53 per sf--the highest per-sf price recorded this year for tourist corridor land, according to Orange County real estate records.

In June, as GlobeSt.com also previously reported, Watson-Thomas sold another 29.5 acres to Intrawest/Orlando Development Corp., an affiliate of Vancouver, BC-based Intrawest Corp., for $19.6 million or $662,711 per acre ($15.21 per sf). The unannounced Pulte and Intrawest projects are crucial components in the development of Watson-Thomas' $1.2-billion undertaking, area planners tell GlobeSt.com. Intrawest Corp. is an international developer of ski resorts.

As the Watson-Thomas tract of 1,780 acres grows more valuable each day, land brokers tell GlobeSt.com the developers will probably never get an opportunity to buy dirt as cheaply as they did in February 2003. At that time, the partners paid Universal Studios an estimated $70 million or about $38,889 per acre (89 cents per sf). "They are now selling parts of that land for almost 25 times more than what they paid for it a year ago," a seasoned south Orlando land broker, who has not participated in the land transactions, tells GlobeSt.com. "They had the foresight, the vision and were willing to take a calculated risk in buying the dirt."