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Article Courtesy of The Palm
Beach Post
By Kimberly Miller
Published November 9, 2022
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Delray Beach developer is hawking a pristine waterfront property in Boca Raton
for a whopping $43 million, but it’s not a mega mansion, it’s under the brackish
patina of the Intracoastal Waterway with a base of muck and sand and threadbare
seagrass.
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After six years of wrangling to clear the title and other legal baggage from the
4 acres of submerged land south of Spanish River Boulevard, owner William Swaim
said it’s ready for the market, which is hot for waterfront parcels.
Swaim, who specializes in flooded lands “that other people overlook,” said the
plot can be filled in with buildable dirt, have a seawall constructed, and is
zoned for single-family homes. He’ll do the dirt and seawall, but it will cost
an extra $3.5 million.
“Submerged parcels are a headache,” Swaim said about making the land
developer-ready. “It takes years to clean them up, and most people don’t want to
take years to clean them up."
True enough, submerged lands have sparked costly legal fights. But they have
also been developed into sites for homes, and even one of the county's most
high-end condominium complexes. One landowner, whose waterlogged property is
adjacent to pricey Manalapan estates associated with billionaire developer Jeff
Greene, envisions floating mansions running on solar energy.
With a pandemic-boosted housing market still flush with wealthy buyers looking
for somewhere to park a yacht, at least one environmental group is concerned
privately owned submerged lands will become more attractive with buyers willing
to do the legwork to develop them.
“I think we are getting to the point
where we can’t afford to lose any more seagrass in our
waterways,” said Everglades Law Center Executive Director
Lisa Interlandi. “Manatees are dying at record rates because
of impacts to their habitat and increasing development on
submerged lands is only going to compound that problem.” |
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Developer William Swaim is selling about 4 acres of
land, including portions that are underwater, for $43 to $46 million
depending on whether he fills it in or builds a seawall. He said
this is the last and largest undeveloped direct Intracoastal
property to come on the market in Boca Raton in 30 years.
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Swaim said his property was dry ground until 1957 when the dirt was stolen
by an adjacent property owner who was issued a permit to use the soil to
build a nearby subdivision. Also, a 2018 Army Corps review of the parcel
notes that development of the site would not adversely affect endangered and
threatened sea turtles, smalltooth sawfish or manatees. The Real Deal
initially reported on Swaim selling his land in September.
Still, Interlandi said the Corps’ review was issued before a record number
of manatees began starving to death for lack of seagrass in the Indian River
Lagoon. Last year, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission
made the unconventional move to feed manatees lettuce in the winter to
mitigate starvation.
Submerged lands are a real estate wildcard in Palm Beach County
It’s unclear how much privately owned submerged land there is in Palm Beach
County’s Intracoastal waterway, a 43-mile ribbon of briny water that links 23
municipalities and includes the Lake Worth Lagoon.
The Palm Beach County Property Appraiser’s office said it has no easy way to
determine the extent of private ownership. The Florida Department of
Environmental Protection said it can research specific properties but doesn’t
know in total how much submerged property is already in the hands of private
landowners.
While Swaim said his property is in what’s considered an artificial waterway,
meaning there are fewer restrictions, there have been at least two controversial
cases in Palm Beach County where privately owned submerged lands in the
environmentally sensitive Lake Worth Lagoon took center stage.
FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto had plans last year to build on submerged land his
company, Government Lot 1, LLC, owns in Singer Island by filling in more than 12
submerged acres. The new dirt would house three multifamily buildings with 110
units each, 15 single-family lots and a 50-slip marina.
After The Palm Beach Post reported on the effort to develop the environmentally
sensitive land vital for sea turtles and seagrasses, public outcry pressured
Barreto to announce he would sell the property to the state instead.
As of Tuesday, the property was still owned by Barreto’s company. Barreto did
not return phone or email messages for this story.
Rodney Barreto, chairman of the Florida Wildlife Conservation Commission.
“With Barreto, there were a lot of politics that came into play and it wasn’t a
true test of his rights,” said James Ryan, a North Palm Beach lawyer who
represented Barreto in the effort to develop the land. “Under state law, you
have a right to bulkhead and fill the properties, but the state tries to
minimize the amount that people can use their contractual rights by saying they
have to protect the environment.”
Submerged lands long the focus of litigation and court battles
Ryan has helped represent self-made millionaire Fane Lozman in another
high-profile case dealing with submerged lands on Singer Island with Lozman
twice winning lawsuits against Riviera Beach that went to U.S. Supreme Court.
The yearslong battle now has Lozman claiming city officials have taken away his
right to use roughly 51 acres of mostly submerged land he owns on Singer Island.
He has asked a federal judge to force Riviera Beach to buy it for a hefty price
of more than $500 million.
The ultra-luxury Bristol condominium, which sold out its units for $600 million,
and the swanky One Watermark Place condominium, both in West Palm Beach, are
built on formerly submerged land.
“I stay away from the Lake Worth Lagoon because there are a bunch of different
rules because it’s not man-made,” Swaim said. "It's some of the most productive
environmental habitat in Palm Beach County."
But Swaim does own 3.3 acres of submerged land in the town of Ocean Ridge
through his company Waterfront ICW Properties that he wanted to develop. The
town wants to rezone parcels surrounding Swaim's land for conservation purposes.
After years of litigation, Swaim said he offered to sell or transfer the
property to the town.
Town attorney Christy Goddeau said there are several contingencies attached to
the offer and that the town commission has given her no direction on what to do
with it.
Palm Beach County property records show Swaim bought the Ocean Ridge land in
2015 for $25,000. A June letter from his attorney to Ocean Ridge says the value
of the land is $4.8 million. He bought the Boca Raton land through his company
NE 32nd Street LLC in 2019 for $1.6 million, although he had it under contract
before that.
How real estate investors buy and sell submerged lands
Swaim said submerged lands are often owned by heirs of people who originally
bought the land decades ago from the state’s Trustees of the Internal
Improvement Trust Fund (TIITF). Sometimes the heirs are out of state, barely
aware they own the land, or the inheritance has been divided among several
people.
“I seek them out to buy it from them,” Swaim said.
Interlandi said just because land is privately owned doesn’t mean it is entitled
to be developed.
“I think we need to do better in terms of protecting our submerged lands,” she
said. “There is still land to build houses on. We don’t need to rely on our
waterways to build homes.”
Five submerged lots for sale north of the Boynton Inlet were acquired by Realtor
Bob Berman in a similarly roundabout way as to what Swaim described. The lots,
which he is asking $15.9 million for in total, were originally sold by the town
of Manalapan in 1955 to Roger and Inez Montgomery.
A company, Jupiter Properties, bought them through a tax deed sale in 1989 for
$2,000. When Jupiter Properties wanted to liquidate its assets, Berman bought it
out in 2015. The sale included oddball parcels such as a 5-foot piece of
oceanfront land in Boynton Beach and the submerged lots in Manalapan.
“I just went through one by one and worked through the problems and was able to
dispose of them. This is the last of that bundle,” Berman said about the
submerged Manalapan lots.
Individual lots are priced from $3.19 million to $9.9 million.
The land, however, sits in front of two ocean-to-lake estates owned by companies
associated with billionaire developer Jeff Greene. One of the homes has a dock
on Berman’s submerged land that he challenged.
Greene said Berman tried to sell him the submerged land for millions of dollars.
Instead, Greene sued to keep the dock and the rights to use it to reach the open
water. The case went to the Florida Supreme Court, which upheld a lower court’s
ruling in favor of allowing Greene to keep the dock.
“I spent a fortune on legal fees,” Greene said. “He (Berman) will never get a
permit to build a building out in the middle of the water and he can’t control
the passageway.”
Berman said he has no desire to fill in the land, although since he listed the
properties in September he has had offers to partner with people to develop it.
"That will take time, and time is what I'm really not interested in dealing with
at this point," he said.
Instead, he hopes that the upland properties adjacent to his submerged parcels
will change hands and the new owners will want to buy his land. He is pitching
in his Zillow listing the possibility of putting “solar-powered floating
mansions” by Miami-based House Yacht Living, on the properties.
“If he wants to put a floating home or houseboat on the property, good luck,”
Greene said. “It’s not going to impact us because our homes will be on the ocean
side.”
Swaim said he's received "quite a few calls" about his Boca Raton property and
has scheduled meetings with brokers. The property has 600 feet of Intracoastal
frontage and its view to the ocean is protected by Spanish River Park. Swaim is
marketing it as the "last and largest undeveloped Boca Raton Intracoastal
property for sale in 30 years."
"Most people don't even know that private people own parts of the Intracoastal,"
Swaim said.
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