Newport Beach’s Koll Co. plans to develop 233 homes at the tip of the Baja peninsula, ending a five-year hiatus from building in Mexico.
The developer and its partner, Greenwich, Conn.-based Starwood Capital Group Global LLC, plan to start preparatory work next month on a 22-acre site in Cabo San Lucas.
The first homes are set to be finished late next year or early 2007, according to Koll.
“We have had our eye on the market for a number of years,” said Jerry Yahr, a managing principal with Koll.
Yahr declined to give the sale price of the land, which the partners bought in summer. The entire development could be worth $400 million, according to a company statement.
Prices for the houses and condominiums are set to range from $625,000 to $3.8 million,cheaper than comparable coastal homes in Orange County.
Here coastal land can sell for $1 million to several million dollars an acre, depending on the number of homes per acre. Koll plans about 10 homes per acre in Cabo San Lucas, making it a fairly dense project.
Yahr said company officials like the beachfront location and the size of the site in Baja.
“It wasn’t a large masterplanned development that required a significant amount of off-site infrastructure,” Yahr said.
Donald Koll, head of Koll Co., was a pioneer in developing a mix of homes with a resort-style golf course in Los Cabos in the 1980s.
His company’s latest project should be smaller in scale.
Koll and Starwood plan to raze the 115-room Hacienda Hotel, a shuttered hotel that never was upgraded as Cabo matured from a fishing stop to a golf vacation spot, Yahr said.
Yahr said the developers plan to use part of the hotel to put up visitors to the development site.
The partners have hired Del Mar Development, a unit of Houston’s Senterra Corp., to build the homes. Plans call for the houses to have four bedrooms with 3,600 square feet each. The condos are expected to range from one to four bedrooms with 1,100 to 3,500 square feet.
Don Koll brought ritzy golf to Los Cabos after buying the Hotel Palmilla and 900 acres of land in 1984. His plan called for 1,300 homes and a 27-hole golf course.
Palmilla also includes a hotel, beach club, tennis courts and a shopping center with restaurants. Don Koll sold the project before all the homes were built.
In 1990, Don Koll bought 1,800 acres about 18 miles up the coast from Palmilla. He prepared the site for Cabo del Sol, with 1,700 homes and an 18-hole golf course.
He sold his interest in Cabo del Sol in 2000, with some homes still in the planning stages.
Don Koll, 72, had a stroke in late October while working at his company’s headquarters.
The longtime developer was taken to Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach where he has been recuperating.
He is undergoing physical and speech therapy, Yahr said. He regularly meets with Don Koll to give him updates.
“He is very focused on his recovery,” Yahr said.
