Billionaire Bill Malhotra plans 220-room hotel in Pompano Beach

Claridge Homes, a Canadian real estate development company led by billionaire Bill Malhotra, plans to build a 15-story, 220-room Courtyard by Marriott hotel near the oceanfront in Pompano Beach.

Ottawa-based Claridge last year paid $4.5 million to acquire the development site at 101 South Ocean Boulevard, now the site of a vacant two-story office building that Bank of America previously occupied.

The Pompano Beach City Commission recently rezoned the property, in a 4-2 vote, from “community business” in the city’s Atlantic Boulevard Overlay District (B-2/AOD) to “general business” in the district (B-3/AOD).

The rezoning increased the site’s maximum lot coverage from 45 percent to 60 percent, which allows Claridge to design a wider hotel with more rooms per floor at a height below the legal limit of 210 feet. The planned 15-story hotel would be 178 feet tall.

Commissioner Alison Fournier, who voted against the zoning ordinance, cited concerns about overdevelopment in the area near the old Bank of America building. “If everything we’ve approved gets built,” she said, “we’re going to have traffic issues, parking issues, issues with seeing the sun.”

“We knew parking and height were concerns” among local residents, Andrew Schein, an attorney for Claridge Homes, told Pompano Beach commissioners at their July 23 meeting. “We have a right to go up to 210 feet with zero parking here. But we heard their concerns, and we didn’t go up to 210 feet, and we added 200 [on-site] parking spaces that we didn’t have to do.”

Claridge’s development site is about two blocks from an oceanfront site at 580 Briney Avenue that Claridge bought in 2022 for $11.5 million, according to county property records. Claridge plans to build a boutique condominium there, called Ocean 580, designed as a 10-story building with 17 units.

Ocean 580 appears on track to open well before Claridge’s planned Courtyard by Marriott in Pompano Beach. Claridge plans to convert the old Bank of America building into a sales center for Ocean 580 before redeveloping the property as a hotel, said Malhotra, the family owned company’s founder and CEO.

Malhotra said his company expects to start construction of Ocean 580 next summer and complete it by the end of 2026. Claridge will break ground for the Courtyard by Marriott hotel in early 2026 and complete construction in 2028, he said.

“Our main business is building houses. Last year we delivered almost 1,000 houses, and our No. 2 business is condos,” Malhotra said. But “we’re pretty diversified. We have 12 or 13 assisted living facilities now. We’re building four or five storage centers. We’re building six hotels in Ontario.”

Claridge also is developing 3000 Waterside, an 18-story, 129-unit condominium at 3000 East Oakland Park Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, a vacant site that fronts the Intracoastal Waterway, across from Shooters Waterfront restaurant

An affiliate of the Canadian company acquired the 2.2-acre site for $12.5 million in 2022, and last year, Claridge changed the brokerage firm handling sales of 3000 Waterside units, replacing Douglas Elliman with ISG World.

Malhotra ranks as the 1,544th wealthiest person in the world, with a personal net worth of $2.1 billion, according to Forbes.

Long overlooked, Pompano Beach has more recently attracted attention from such seasoned developers as Related Group and Merrimac Ventures. They  are partnering to develop a Waldorf Astoria-branded condo at 1350 South Ocean Boulevard in Pompano Beach.

Philadelphia-based U.S. Development, led by CEO John Farina, is developing Salato Residences , a 10-story, 40-unit condo at 305 Briney Avenue in Pompano Beach. In December, U.S. Development arranged for Douglas Elliman to start working with brokerage firm IMI Worldwide to handle pre-construction sales of Salato units. Last year, Edgardo Defortuna’s Fortune International Group and Ricardo Dunin’s Oak Capital landed a $259 million construction loan for The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Pompano Beach. Fortune and Oak Capital are developing the two-building, 205-unit condo project on a 4.6-acre site at 1380 South Ocean Boulevard.