Leveraged buyout king pays $15M for SoBe condo

A penthouse at Ocean House, a 28-unit condominium tower at 121 Ocean Drive in South Beach, was sold for $15 million, or $3,592 per square foot, in an all-cash deal completed late Thursday, the buyer’s broker, realtor Jonathan F. Castañeda of Fortune International Realty, told The Real Deal.

Although Castañeda would only provide the address of the sale and identify the buyer as American, Florida state records list the buyer as PH702 LLC, and the LLC’s manager as U.S. investor Marc J. Leder, the Boca Raton-based co-chief executive of leveraged buyout firm Sun Capital Partners.

Negotiations lasted nearly four months with the seller, celebrity Miami restaurateur Myles Chefetz, who reduced the price from an initial $18.5 million last November to $16.9 million in April before selling the property for $15 million, a 23 percent discount on the original listing.

“The seller wanted to break the record at $3,800 per square foot, but Ocean House just doesn’t have the name recognition,” Castañeda said, comparing the development to the Miami Beach Setai and Ian Schrager’s Residences at the Edition, where a South Florida record was set in March when “As Seen on TV” creator Ajit Khubani purchased two penthouses for a combined $34 million.

Chefetz bought the four-bedroom, five-and-a-half bathroom, 4,176-square-foot unit under contract pre-construction from the developer in 2005. The market crash delayed building, so the deal, at $7.2 million, was not completed until 2009.

Chefetz then invested about three years and $5.5 million to gut and build out the property from raw space, contracting Miami-based interior designer Alison Antrobus, who also designed Chefetz’s Prime 112, a South of Fifth steakhouse and among the top-grossing restaurants in the U.S., and Miami Heat President Pat Riley’s Miami Beach penthouse. Antrobus hired Swiss-Italian landscape architect Enzo Enea to design the rooftop pool deck. A $400,000 Crestron system controls lighting, surround sound, audiovisual, window shades and air conditioning which can be operated with waterproof remotes from the pool.

“The attention to detail on this place is crazy,” said Dora Puig of Puig Werner Real Estate Services LLC, Chefetz’s broker.

Chefetz moved into Ocean House in early 2012, putting it on the market about eight months later after deciding that he would rather live in a house, according to Castañeda.