Foreign buyers acquiring most of the units at Fort Lauderdale firm’s Orlando resort

Fort Lauderdale-based BTI Partners is selling most of the vacation homes at a resort development in Orlando to Brazilians and other foreign buyers.

BTI is developing The Grove Resort & Spa, an 878-unit resort that rents units as vacation homes on behalf of their mostly foreign owners.

Peggy Fucci, chief executive officer of One World Properties, told Forbes magazine that foreign buyers of Florida properties have flocked to Miami, but many are now buying vacation homes in Orlando developments “because the returns are good, thanks to tourism.”

The Grove Resort & Spa offers shuttle bus service to the nearby Walt Disney World theme park, one of the main attractions that drew 72 million tourists to Orlando last year.

So far, 65 percent of the development’s vacation home have been sold to foreign buyers. A total 330 units have been sold at an average price of $370,000.

About 25 percent of the buyers are Chinese, and another 20 percent come from Latin America, almost all of them from Brazil.

One of the Brazilian buyers, Tosiyuki Nakamura, paid $330,000 last year for a three-bedroom vacation home at The Grove. He says his monthly income from renting the property is $2,900 – or 6.5 times the average monthly income of Sao Paulo residents.

BTI bought The Grove Resort & Spa when it was substantially built for $150 million in 2013. The seller, a British citizen named Paul Oxley, developed of the shell of the property, which had been known as Grande Palisades, before he filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors.

Construction work is ongoing at The Grove Resort & Spa, where crews are working on about 300 units. [Forbes] – Mike Seemuth