After a major falling out, Masoud Shojaee has pulled out of his joint venture with Ugo Colombo to develop the Collection Residences, a planned mixed-use project with 128 condo units in Coral Gables.
“Ugo Colombo and I will no longer be pursuing a joint venture to develop The Collection Residences,” Shojaee, president and chairman of Shoma Group said in a statement. “… At this point, it was simply a matter of terminating our relationship to co-develop the project.”
Colombo, founder of CMC Group, told The Real Deal that he still plans to build the Coral Gables project — eventually. The land, which his firm owns together with Shojaee’s Shoma Group, is not for sale, he said.
“The project is not dead, because it was never alive,” Colombo told TRD in an interview at an Urban Land Institute conference in Miami on Tuesday.
“We’re putting every effort now in [Brickell] Flatiron, and we’re about to break ground,” he said. Once that project has progressed, he will turn his focus to the Collection Residences, he said.
The Collection Residences recently opened a sales gallery at 209 Altara Avenue in Coral Gables, which was staffed with CMC agents. The sales center is now closed, CMC Group said. The project is planned to be across the street from Colombo’s The Collection auto dealership.
Shojaee declined to comment beyond his statement, in which he said the move “was not a reflection of market conditions, rather an opportunity to take the project in a new direction.”
Coral Gables Luxury Holdings, a company owned and managed by the joint venture partnership of Colombo of CMC Group and Shojaee of Shoma, acquired the Collection Residences’ development site for $27 million in December 2013. The 2.8-acre property includes 4101 Salzedo Street and 4112 Aurora Street. The site currently includes two office buildings, a small amount of warehouse space and parking lots.
Coral Gables Luxury had originally filed development plans with the city to build 270 high-end residences and about 40,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. Arquitectonica was hired to design the mixed-use development.
The Collection Residences marks the second project this year linked to Colombo that is not moving forward as planned.
In May, Colombo and his partners put an assemblage of parcels at 830 Southeast First Avenue in Miami on the market. The 0.8-acre property, marketed as 830 Brickell, across from the planned Brickell City Centre, includes development rights and plans. Colombo’s CMC Group had acquired the land for an undisclosed amount in July 2013, according to Miami-Dade property records. The property had been purchased out of bankruptcy by Oleg Baibakov, a Russian oligarch. CMC’s partner on the property for sale is Russian developer Vlad Doronin, who is also CMC’s partner on Brickell Flatiron, at 1001 South Miami Avenue. A second Brickell Flatiron tower was originally planned for the site.