Buyer of $23M Indian Creek lot tied to Saudi royal family

The buyer of the vacant lot at 2 Indian Creek Island Road that sold for $23 million on Friday is a corporate entity linked to Khalid bin Al Saud, who likely has ties to Saudi royalty.

The deed was recorded on Thursday for the sale, which marked the highest price ever paid for vacant land on Indian Creek Island. The buyer was 212A LLC, which listed a Boston address. Al Saud is listed as the owner.

Veronica Cervera Goeseke, CEO of Cervera Real Estate, represented the new buyer, along with her son Nickel M. Goeseke. She declined to disclose the buyer’s identity, but said the family intends to build a home to live on the island.

“My son and I were showing them Miami, and we just thought that Indian Creek was ideal for them,” Cervera Goeseke told The Real Deal. After seeing the island and the lifestyle it affords, they agreed, she added.

Al Saud has listed his Ritz-Carlton Residences apartment at 2 Avery Street, unit 37F, in Boston for $3 million, according to Realtor.com. According to public records, two other apartments at Ritz-Carlton Residences are also owned by six individuals with the last name Al-Saud.

Meanwhile, in New York, a massive Upper West side triplex owned by an affiliate of Saudi Prince Nawaf bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud has hit the market for $48.5 million, The Real Deal reported, citing the Wall Street Journal. The prince’s 10,500-square-foot unit features a sushi bar, a cigar room and three panic rooms is located inside the Heritage at Trump Place at 240 Riverside Boulevard and includes four bathrooms and six-and-a-half bathrooms.  Douglas Elliman’s Raphael De Niro and Nest Seekers International’s Brian Chan and Ryan Serhant have the listing.

The Al Saud family is the ruling royal family of Saudi Arabia. The King of Saudi Arabia, Salmon, is among the family’s thousands of members.

At the time of the sale of 2 Indian Creek Island Drive,  Jill Eber, of the Jills, who represented the seller with her partner Jill Hertzberg, with Coldwell Banker, had said a foreign buyer had purchased the nearly two-acre lot for cash. The seller was a South American who had bought the property for $14.5 million in April 2014.

“It’s a magnificent lot on an incredible island,” Hertzberg told TRD. Next door, at 3 Indian Creek Island Road, the Jills achieved a record sale in the county in 2012: a Russian billionaire paid $47 million for a nearly 30,000-square-foot, 13-bedroom, 14 bathroom and two-half-bath estate. That mansion’s 80,000-square-foot lot — the same size as 2 Indian Creek — had sold to a developer for $10.3 million in 2007. “The property values on that island have been going up and up and up and up,” Hertzberg said.

The property at 2 Indian Creek comes with a large dock, which was a strong selling point, Eber said.

Indian Creek is a private playground for the ultra-wealthy, with just about three dozen homes, each with waterfront views on lots in excess of an acre. Among its residents are some of America’s 500 wealthiest people, according to Forbes, including activist investor Carl Icahn, car dealership mogul Norman Braman and hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert. Still other residents include singer Julio Iglesias, retired Dolphins coach Don Shula, Colombian banker Jaime Galinski, Turnberry Associates co-CEOs Jackie Soffer and brother Jeffrey Soffer and Spanish-language TV personality “Don Francisco,” whose real name is Mario Kreutzberger.