Developer Matthews in cash crunch

Palm Beach builder Robert Matthews has lost three marquee properties to foreclosure and is now, along with his socialite wife, Mia, infamous as Palm Beach County’s single largest delinquent property-tax debtor. The duo currently owe $264,450 on Casa Bendita (Blessed House) from 2008, and in June, lenders seized the 19th century Point Breeze hotel in Nantucket, where Matthews once hoped to sell renovated condos for $1.5 million apiece. Meanwhile, Matthews’ former Heart of Palm hotel on Royal Palm Way in Palm Beach was sold at a courthouse auction in September for $10 million after a foreclosure judgment, and there’s an auction scheduled for next week on his one-acre lot of prime Palm Beach property at the corner of Royal Palm Way and South County Road. It will be sold unless Matthews can come up with the $20.1 million lenders say he, and his company Royal County, LLC, owes on the mortgage. [Palm Beach Post]