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If you’re familiar with the Canyon Ranch brand — with its flagship Tucson, Ariz.-based health and wellness resort, where those with the cash get away and get fit — entering Miami Beach’s Canyon Ranch is kind of what you’d expect, if a little more Miami. Ponytailed mothers and daughters lounge in Lululemon. Couples in their twilight years and track pants sip smoothies. Men of a certain age in gym shorts and earbuds stretch out their quads.
If you’ve never heard of Canyon Ranch, as my husband had not before we arrived for a recent weekend stay, you might be in for something of a surprise. The woman who checked us in said, in faux astonishment, staring at the beverage clutched in my husband’s hand, “You can’t drink Diet Coke at Canyon Ranch!” (His response was to chug it. Sufficiently shamed, subsequent Diet Cokes were consumed furtively and off property.)
The confusion on his face deepened as she handed us a schedule of exercise classes, a gym bag and a water bottle. As we settled in, even I was impressed by the level of commitment the guests and the resort maintain.
At Canyon Ranch, fries are made from sliced artichoke hearts (mmmm) and bagels from hemp (meh). Everyone works out and, in between, spends hours in monkish brown robes and rubber slippers moving between saunas and “igloos,” rain showers and foot baths.
This is where you go to relax on heated chaises and spend a fortune on spa treatments. (My 50-minute prenatal massage cost $150.) A detox retreat.
Or in Miami, where there are 430 separate condo residences along with the 150 sold-out hotel-condo units, possibly a lifestyle.
Just four years ago, Miami’s Canyon Ranch was another sad example of a big idea gone bust. WSG Development had finished the complex, which included the renovation of the old Carillon hotel flanked by the construction of two brand-new residential towers. A large portion of the condos had sold pre-construction for prices exceeding $1,000 per square foot. Then the economy collapsed. The developer defaulted on loans. Lehman Brothers, the lender, reclaimed the project. And most of the buyers walked away.
It’s taken two brokerages, a 25 to 30 percent price slash and a lot of time for the project to turn around. But turn around it has.
“We started off in the $600s to $700s a square foot,” says Mark Pordes, CEO of Pordes Residential, which Lehman hired to sell the remainder of the building in 2010. “We slowly started to graduate the price as we saw traction in 2011.”
Of the more than 300 units his firm was tasked with selling, Pordes only has three townhouses and “nine or 10” developer units that have yet to come to market. The townhouses are priced upwards of $800 per square foot.
“We came in, we really outreached to the market, we sourced our network, we really had a streamlined marketing plan,” says Pordes, whose firm has something of a reputation for coming in and saving stalled projects. It sold the rest of One Bal Harbour and Terra Beachside, other struggling Miami condo developments. But there are fewer struggling buildings to save in Miami these days.
“We’re looking into some deals in northern Florida, condos on the beach in the Panhandle area. We’re looking at some things in Las Vegas, and we’re looking at some new pre-construction opportunities, because there aren’t a lot of standing inventory opportunities left in Miami and in Aventura and Sunny Isles,” Pordes says. “We’re getting calls and we’re busy.”