Don King is stepping back into the real estate ring by listing 52 acres in Palm Beach County’s Mangonia Park where previous attempts to develop the property fizzled out.
The former Palm Beach Jai Alai fronton site at 1415 45th Street owned by the iconic boxing promoter recently hit the market without an asking price, The Real Deal has learned. Art Porosoff with Miami-based Porosoff Group is the listing broker. A source familiar with the listing said that King and his team are expecting “offers to come in at $2 million an acre.”
That’s a price tag of at least $104 million for a development site where the “current zoning is limited,” according to an offering memorandum placed on Real Capital Markets, a listing service for institutional sellers and buyers.
King bought the site for $6.3 million in 1999, records show.
The property is primarily zoned for office, governmental, medical outpatient, educational and manufacturing uses, the offering states. Although 25 percent of the site could be used for some retail such as pharmacies, gift shops, restaurants and gyms.
“From conversations, we believe that the town may be open to a code rewrite that would allow for more uses and higher density development,” the memorandum states. “While there may be some sensitivity around building height — particularly along the western boundary — there is potential flexibility for taller structures on other parts of the site, including the center of the property and northern and southern edges.”
The site is near the last stop for the tri-county commuter train Tri-Rail and is within an Opportunity Zone, which is a federally designated area where investors can park their capital gains in development projects that create jobs and economic growth for the surrounding neighborhood. Investors who wait to cash out after a decade won’t get taxed on their capital gains invested in an Opportunity Zone project.
King, a 93-year-old boxing legend who is a longtime Boca Raton resident, had tried to sell the site before, most recently a decade ago. But the deals never crystalized. In 2015, West Palm Beach-based FRI Investors signed a contract to buy the property and was in talks with city officials to build a distribution center. King killed the deal because he did not want to sell to a buyer who planned an industrial use for the site, published reports state.
The same year, King informed Mangonia Park officials that he was going to sign a new deal to sell the property for $100 million to an investor who would build a technical facility that would create 1,500 jobs. However, nothing materialized, published reports state.
Last month, a lender filed a foreclosure complaint against an entity managed by King that owns a warehouse in Deerfield Beach. The King entity allegedly defaulted on a $5.3 million loan, the pending lawsuit states.