Laurent Groll Flips Hibiscus Island Lot In A Month
375 North Hibiscus Drive on Hibiscus Island
Miami Beach real estate investor Laurent Groll and his partners flipped a waterfront HIbiscus Island lot for $14 million — a 31 percent gain — in one month, The Real Deal has learned.
Groll and his partners Nelson Gonzalez and Alfredo Xiques sold the 0.4-acre lot at 375 North Hibiscus Drive in Miami Beach to Nb Hibiscus, according to the brokers involved in the deal. The partners bought the property through a trio of LLCs for $10.7 million last month. Xiques is a Miami-based real estate lawyer, and Gonzalez is a broker with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices EWM Realty. Gonzalez represented the sellers, and Marc Tetzner of Intereal Group represented the buyer.
Nb Hibiscus is registered to Nicola Januschke-Bleicher, an Austrian businesswoman. Both Gonzalez and Tetzner declined to disclose the identity of the buyer.
With this latest sale, Groll and his partners are walking away with about a $3 million profit in a month.
Groll originally planned to develop a spec house on the lot, designed by Miami architect Kobi Karp of Kobi Karp Architecture & Interior Design. Groll bought the property with the Karp plans from Artefacto owner Paulo Bacchi, who had commissioned Karp for the design.
“Larry Groll had every intention of building this thing, to the point where he hired a builder. He was ready to put a shovel in the ground,” Gonzalez said.
Both Gonzalez and Tetzner confirmed the new buyer intends to build the Karp-designed house on the lot.
The rapid turnaround of this lot reflects voracious buyer appetite for waterfront properties, at a time when the supply of new homes is limited.
“There’s not a lot of spec building going on so the inventory is not really replenishing itself,” Gonzalez said. “At the high end, I don’t see that market replenishing, I don’t see prices coming down at all.”
Hibiscus Island, one of the luxury island communities in Miami Beach, has been a hot spot for high-end deals with eye popping prices. In May, a shipping tycoon flipped a waterfront teardown on the island for $17.5 million. A waterfront spec mansion sold for $29.1 million that same month.
Non-waterfront sales have also drawn unheard-of prices on the island. A24 film studio co-founder Matthew Bires purchased a pair of adjacent non-waterfront properties on Hibiscus Island last month for a combined $16 million.
