The 15,849-square-foot home at 101 Casa Bendita in Palm Beach is the subject of a $24 million foreclosure action, according to the South Florida Business Journal. Real estate taxes on the home, which belongs to Robert Matthews, are $273,974 per year. The home is currently listed for sale at $44 million. Matthews, who is described as a friend of former Connecticut Governor John Rowland by the New York Times, is a real estate investor in Palm Beach whose companies have seen a bit of trouble in the last few years. [more]

Bob Matthews, the prominent Palm Beach real estate investor who recently lost his Palm House hotel in Palm Beach and another resort in Nantucket, has had a rough year. In an interview, he said 2009 was “humbling,” even as a foreclosure sale of his office complex at 221/205 Royal Palm Way loomed on Monday. He said his setback have gotten more attention than many other people hurt in the real estate collapse, but added that he plans to continue to be a part of local charities, even as he and wife, Mia, have fallen delinquent $264,450 in property taxes on Casa Bendita, their $15 million oceanfront home in the North End. [Palm Beach Daily News]

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]