Developer asks $43M for waterfront Boca home sites

A Palm Beach County developer listed a development site in Boca Raton for single-family homes for $43 million. The catch? The property is mostly underwater, and would have to be filled in.

William Swaim, of NE 32nd Street LLC, said the site, on the west side of Northeast Eighth Avenue and south of Northeast 32nd Street, is asking $46.5 million if it were to be filled and built with a seawall. Swaim said the property is a “unicorn,” and after a legal battle has been legally declared as buildable land.

The 4-acre parcel is zoned for about 1.8 units per acre, which means a buyer would likely build at least four homes and up to about seven. If a buyer purchases additional land that Swaim owns in the Intracoastal Waterway, he estimates that about 12 homes could be built. He called it one of the last undeveloped waterfront sites on the market in Boca Raton.

The property has about 600 feet of frontage on the Intracoastal Waterway, where Swaim said homes have been appreciating in value by more than 10 percent over the past 18 months.

This month, Robert Kelly, a former chairman and CEO of Bank of New York Mellon, sold his waterfront home in Boca’s Royal Palm Yacht & Country Club to a luxury retailer for $9.4 million. Kelly bought the property in 2013 for $3.7 million, records show.

In July, luxury carpet mogul Steven Stark and his wife, Candice Stark, bought a flipped mansion in the same community for $17.2 million, a 60 percent markup from its purchase price a year earlier.

Earlier this year, yacht broker Joseph Perez sold his waterfront Boca home for $6.3 million to the wife of a rock salt tycoon.