The third time has been the charm for Tate Capital. The family-owned real estate company based in North Miami unsuccessfully proposed two site plans to redevelop the Bahia Mar resort along Fort Lauderdale’s beach. The city government rejected the first one as too tall, towering over 30 stories, and the second as too fat, a design that would block views of the ocean just east of Bahia Mar and, to the west, the Intracoastal Waterway.
This year, however, Tate Capital and its partners won city approval of a Bahia Mar site plan to build a new 30-story hotel with 256 rooms and 60 condo-hotel units next to four 22-story condominium buildings with as many as 350 units, plus a boardwalk, a park and 88,000 square feet of commercial space for restaurants and retail stores. Preconstruction sales of the condos are expected to start in 2024 – 10 years after the Tate family started trying to develop the property. The Tates in 2014 acquired a lease on the city-owned property that encompasses Bahia Mar, on the southern end of the city’s barrier island.
“It’s a great site plan. I will admit, it’s the best site plan of the three,” said Jimmy Tate, who co-founded Tate Capital with his brother Kenny Tate. “I just wish – with proper dialogue, communication and transparency – we could have gotten to this point nine years ago. But at the end of the day, all’s well that ends well. We’re really excited about this development.”
Prices for the condos planned at Bahia Mar will be comparable to, if not above, condo prices at such developments at the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Fort Lauderdale, Pier Sixty-Six and the Ritz-Carlton Fort Lauderdale. Tate said in an interview in late October that average condo prices per square foot range from about $2,000 at Pier Sixty-Six, and $2,200 at the Ritz, to $2,500 at Four Seasons. “We’ll be there – or above,” he said. “Construction costs are higher now, interest rates are higher now, insurance is higher now. That’s going to force our development to be more expensive.”
Tate and his brother are redeveloping Bahia Mar together with Sergio Rok, who runs Miami-based Rok Enterprises, and Miami-based megadeveloper Related Group, led by founder, chairman and chief executive officer Jorge Pérez and his sons Jon Paul, the president of Related, and Nicholas, head of the company’s condominium division. “Related Group has been our partner on over 20 deals,” Tate said in an interview in late October. “We’ve been doing business with Related Group since back in 2009 and 2010. It’s been a great relationship. We’re close friends with Jorge Pérez, and now his boys.”
Pérez initially passed on an offer to invest together with the Tate brothers and Sergio Rok in a redevelopment of Bahia Mar. The Tate brothers also faced resistance to their plans from the owner and the operator of the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, which uses Bahia Mar’s marina on the Intracoastal Waterway as one of its main venues. Bahia Mar was the sole venue when the annual boat show began in 1959 and remains the show’s hub. Seven sites on and off the water normally serve as boat show venues, but one was offline in 2023. (An ongoing expansion of the Las Olas Marina cut to six the number of 2023 venues.)
“Before we acquired [the lease on] Bahia Mar, we asked Jorge if he would like to be a partner with us. He really didn’t understand the marina business or the hotel business, so he decided not to get involved originally,” Tate said. But after the Tate brothers decided to put high-end condos on the Bahia Mar property, Pérez agreed to invest in the residential portion of the project. “He actually was going to be part of the deal back in 2015,” Tate said. “And that site plan – the first of three – was then denied.” Tate’s investor group originally, and unsuccessfully, had proposed to redevelop Bahia Mar with two 36-story condominium buildings and a new hotel to replace the property’s existing 296-room DoubleTree hotel.
The Tate camp subsequently agreed to downsize their proposed condo height to 29 stories in response to local criticism. “I don’t want to see Manhattan on Fort Lauderdale Beach,” then-Vice Mayor Dean Trantalis said at a special city commission meeting on May 10, 2016. Trantalis, now the city’s mayor, cast the sole dissenting vote during that meeting seven years ago, which ended at 2:15 a.m. after more than 50 citizens spoke publicly in opposition to the proposed redevelopment. At the end of the marathon meeting, the Fort Lauderdale City Commission voted 4-1 to grant conditional approval for a Bahia Mar redevelopment plan with two 29-story condominium buildings.
The downsized plans for Bahia Mar unraveled within weeks, though. To move the city’s approval from conditional to final, the developers had to reach a new long-term agreement with the owner and operator of the annual Fort Lauderdale boat show. But negotiations between Tate’s group and the boat-show camp ended without a deal. In June 2016, the developers withdrew their application to the city to redevelop Bahia Mar with high-rise condos.
The Tates worked with Kobi Karp, a Miami-based architect, to design a low-rise version of their planned condo development at Bahia Mar. But despite lower building heights, the new design failed to win over enough city commissioners. “It was more of a village-style community. A lot of density, a lot of buildings throughout the property. I think we had 15 or 16 buildings,” Tate said. “But certain commissioners didn’t like that, because it was taking away too many view corridors throughout the property … which basically made us redo the site plan.”
Undaunted, the Tates successfully proposed a new 100-year lease on Bahia Mar to replace the lease they acquired in 2014 that was set to expire in 2062, because condo development was infeasible without a longer-term lease on the property. In April 2022, city commissioners canceled the old lease on Bahia Mar and approved a new one for the developers with a 50-year initial term extendable to 100 years.
The developers also extended the term of their venue agreement with the Fort Lauderdale boat show to match the term of their new lease on Bahia Mar. “The boat show is going to have about 7.3 acres of open, contiguous waterfront space for their future boat shows in perpetuity,” Tate said. “Now, they’re coterminous with our lease, so they’re there for another hundred years.”
With the long-term lease in hand, “we re-engaged with Related Group and asked them to be part of the equation again, which they happily did,” Tate said, “and they were involved in the design of the new product we’re doing.” The design created more open space on the Bahia Mar property by stacking buildings on top of podiums with parking garages.
The developers passed their last big regulatory test in June 2023 when the Fort Lauderdale City Commission approved their third site plan, featuring a new hotel, four 22-story condo buildings and ample public space. Commissioners also okayed a rezoning of the 39.8-acre Bahia Mar property from SBMHAD (South Beach Marina and Hotel Area District) to PDD (Planned Development District).
In the final months of 2023, the developers were negotiating a contract to put a luxury brand name on the planned hotel and condo buildings at Bahia Mar. “Once we announce the brand, people are going to get it and say, ‘Oh my God. That is perfect,” Tate said in an Oct. 27 interview. “Fort Lauderdale is going to be pleasantly surprised when they see the brand and the end product. Fort Lauderdale is already on the map, but this is going to solidify the direction that Fort Lauderdale has gone.”
