A whopping $502 million offer. One very big decision to make. Should we sell our tiny beachside South Florida community?
As it turns out, this developer’s offer — for $502,496,000 — wasn’t too good to resist: The residents of Briny Breezes turned it down, they said Thursday.
“Not on my slice of paradise,” vowed Briny Breezes resident Chuck Swift.
The residents’ decision comes as South Florida faces a housing affordability crisis and a big demand for land. It also marks only the latest offer to try to buy the community, a quaint town of homes sandwiched between cities of multimillion-dollar mega-mansions in Palm Beach County.
It’s the town where residents can see from the Intracoastal to the ocean. It was in 1958 when the “tin-can tourists” banded together to buy their 43-acre property from their landlord, and incorporated in 1963.
On April 11, management emailed the residents that an unnamed developer offered $502,496,000 for the town. The email, obtained by the South Florida Sun Sentinel, warned them there was “no clear idea of what the buyer proposes for redevelopment.”
At a standing room-only meeting Wednesday, many residents refused to even think about selling.
“We’re the last vestige of Old World Florida,” said Lynne Weiner, who has been in Briny Breezes since the 1950s, and has lived there full-time since 2000. “We’re a kitschy place. I’d love to stay here forever.”
“This used to be a really, really nice neighborhood,” she said. “Now, it’s just a really nice location.”
A resident in attendance, James Arena, who is a real estate agent, detailed how the board rejected the offer.
“There were a couple of people that were inclined to counteroffer, but the majority of shareholders did not want to accept the offer or a counteroffer,” he said. “They were laughing at the offer.”
There are residents who “don’t want to sell, they want to die here,” he said. But yet “at the end of the day if the numbers came together” maybe there’s something worth talking about.
“They can take their $500 million and triple it and maybe they’ll have a chance, maybe,” he said.
Still, he predicted this wouldn’t be the last offer.
“I know they’ll come back again. They don’t like to hear the word ‘no.’ They’ll be back with more money and better terms, that’s for sure,” Arena said.
Briny Breezes Inc., the corporation that owns the property, wouldn’t talk about what happens next: “Why would I do that?” Michael Gallacher, the general manager of Briny Breezes Inc., told the Sun Sentinel on Thursday. “Call all the board members you want” but none would speak publicly about the issue, he said.
Gallacher followed up with an email, stating “the offer recently received was unsolicited and extremely underwhelming in price, tax consequences and development terms. The board presented this to the shareholders to be fully transparent. The board voted to do nothing further with the offer, rejecting it with no counteroffer.”
The name of the developer who made the offer has not been publicly released.
This month’s attempts at a sale weren’t the first offer for Briny Breezes.
In 2007, the residents agreed to sell their town and its 488 trailers to Ocean Land Investments, a Boca Raton developer, for $510 million. The average payout was anticipated to be about $1 million, with owners of smaller, interior lots getting less and owners with larger oceanfront and Intracoastal lots getting a larger piece of the pie.
But the developer backed out, which meant plans evaporated for the “Brinyites” to become instant millionaires when their beloved land would become a luxury resort.
Gallacher said in his email that since that offer “property values have seen significant increases since that time, in many cases triple that of 2006. While shareholders feel there is no price to put on this paradise, many have indicated that an offer much closer to 1 billion dollars with favorable terms and conditions may be considered.”
This latest offer comes a couple months after residents voted to not even list the property for $1 billion.
Gallacher said in his email that in February, residents, known as shareholders, were asked if they wanted to list the property for sale “and less than 30% voted affirmatively on that question.”
“Most of the people who live or reside in Briny are blessed,” said resident Keith Black, a former board member of the corporation. “The lifestyle is more important to them than the money.”
He said offers come up sporadically and many are too small to even be brought to the attention of the residents.
“For three years I never went west of I-95,” he said. “There’s no reason to.”
Resident Swift has lived in the community for seven years.
“It’s Old Florida,” Swift said. “It got stuck in the ’70s. You can take your golf cart and drive right to the beach and put your feet in the sand.”
Bordered by the towns of Ocean Ridge and Gulf Stream, “we’re surrounded by billionaires and millionaires. A guy [who] paid $36 million for his house is two blocks away with the same lifestyle.”
Well, not exactly.
Briny Breezes trailer park residents have to evacuate in a hurricane. Swift said he can’t even get insurance.
But still, “you cannot replace it.”
“Anyone interested would have to come in north of $1 billion. We’re down the street from Trump, all the neighbors are millionaires,” he said. (The former president’s estate, Mar-a-Lago, is about 12 miles away.) Mayor Gene Adams said he was keeping his opinions of a sale to himself.
“The community is kind of split on it, I don’t want to influence anything one way or the other,” he said. But, “It’s an amazing piece of land and that’s why everybody loves Briny. There is no place like Briny, that’s for sure.”
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com. Follow on Twitter @LisaHuriash
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