http://www.orlandosentinel.com/busi...2,1,1722474.story?coll=orl-business-headlines
There is an article in the Orlando Sentinel today about this resort.
New Disney-area resort is up the creek without a hotel
Bonnet Creek developer banking on tourism surge
By Jerry W. Jackson | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 2, 2004
Driving slowly over what will soon be paved streets in the Bonnet Creek Resort near Walt Disney World, developer Dan Paris peers into the distance and spots Epcot. With pine trees cleared away, Epcot's silver dome gleams in the sun.
"You can imagine what the view of the fireworks will be like from here," said Paris, cruising past the steel and concrete of time-share towers under construction on the property.
But Bonnet Creek has yet to set off any fireworks of its own. The 482-acre hotel resort is nearing completion of its infrastructure, such as water, sewer and roads. But it is still searching for its first hotel.
With the hotel and tourism industries showing signs of a rebound, that should change, said Paris, senior vice president and partner in Bonnet Creek's master developer, Brooksville Development Corp. of Orlando.
"The [hotel] market is just starting to come back and get healthy again," Paris said. "People are starting to see strong indicators, and the economy appears to be growing."
Tourism's slowdown after Sept. 11, 2001, put hotel expansion on ice throughout the country, except for projects in the pipeline. Major recent additions to the inventory in the Orlando area include Disney's Pop Century Resort, nearly 3,000 rooms on the doorstep of Bonnet Creek, and the Grande Lakes Resort, with more than 1,500 rooms.
Bonnet Creek has space for up to four hotels with 2,800 rooms, but so far the only buyer is Fairfield Resorts. The Orlando-based time-share giant is now building more than 700 units on 46 acres.
Paris said the Bonnet Creek project envisions selling parcels to luxury hotels similar to those in the upscale Grande Lakes, which has a Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott.
But even if an upscale buyer surfaces soon for Bonnet Creek, it will be years before the first rooms open. "From design and permitting to opening, it's four to five years," Paris said.
While the economy has been slow to rebound from the 2001 recession, the hotel market has been even slower to crawl from the hole, said Peter Gluckler, spokesman for Lodging Econometrics, a New Hampshire company that analyzes the industry from a real estate perspective.
"Generally speaking, the hotel industry lags behind the whole economy, sometimes by six months to a year," Gluckler said. "Developers can get financing for hotel construction at pretty decent rates, but they're still very cautious."
The industry has been consolidating, and renovations on existing properties will continue to be a focus for many companies for a while longer, Gluckler said.
"The Orlando area in particular is pretty well saturated with hotels and rooms," Gluckler said. Lodging Econometrics projects that the Orlando market will add only a little more than 1,000 new rooms in 2004, a growth rate of less than 1 percent.
But Paris counters that the Bonnet Creek property, bordered on three sides by Disney, is so well situated that the concerns about saturation don't apply. It is one of the few large parcels in the area not owned by Disney.
"The Lake Buena Vista market consistently operates better than Florida or the nation" in terms of hotel occupancy and revenue, Paris said.
Part of the challenge in finding hotels for Bonnet Creek is that the pool of upscale brands is limited, said Guy Butler, a veteran Orlando architect with projects ranging from Pointe Orlando to Church Street Market.
"All of the major hotel guys know the site," said Butler, who is designing the clubhouse at Bonnet Creek's 18-hole golf course. Brands such as Four Seasons and Mandarin are the caliber that the developer would like to attract, Butler said, and they are far pickier than brands that have less star power.
"There's no question it's a spectacular site," Butler said, and Brooksville Development "has the staying power to ensure that the right clients are in there." The one top brand that has been essentially crossed from the list of possibilities, he said, is Ritz-Carlton, because it recently opened an outlet at Grande Lakes Resort, seven miles northeast of Bonnet Creek.
Brooksville has had experience sitting on hotel projects for years, having tried and failed to put together a deal to build a towering Westin hotel on International Drive in the late 1990s. But Paris said the Bonnet Creek site is in a class by itself, close enough to the Orange County Convention Center and I-Drive to benefit from citywide conventions, yet on Disney's door.
"It's as close to Disney as you can get," Paris said, with an entrance on Buena Vista Drive.
But even if the right hotel buyer fails to surface soon, Paris said, the record sales pace at Fairfield Resorts is promising and gives the project some potential flexibility in that the mix could shift more to time shares and away from hotels. Fairfield has an option on a second parcel, enough room to build about 350 more units.
"If we see time shares doing better, we could always do [more] time shares," on one of the proposed hotel sites, Paris said. There are no plans, he said, to change the name of the project to Fairfield's Bonnet Creek Resort.
Jerry W. Jackson can be reached at
jwjackson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5721.
