Robert Matthews, who owns several companies that invest in Palm Beach
real estate, is in danger of losing a third property in the town. Fifth
Third Bank has filed a foreclosure action against NHM Realty, one of
Matthews’ companies, for a $14.4 million note on a nearly
24,000-square-foot property on Royal Palm Way. Matthews lost two other
properties in the last year — another office site and the Palm House hotel,
the former Heart of Palm hotel, which was never completed. Matthews
also lost the Point Breeze hotel in Nantucket in 2009, where he
had sought to sell renovated condos. [SFBJ]

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]