El-Ad National Pays $60M for Fort Lauderdale Beach's Sea Club Resort

El-Ad National Properties, the Boca Raton-based development arm of Isaac Tshuva’s El-Ad Group, has bought the 99-room Sea Club Resort at 619 N Fort Lauderdale Beach Blvd for $60 million. The seller, an entity tied to Rachel Levy and Michael Man that has owned the property since 1995, carried $40 million of the price as seller financing. Berkadia marketed the deal.

Why it matters

The Sea Club trade is a live test of what an assembled oceanfront hotel parcel is worth on Fort Lauderdale beach once the site plan pencils out as a residential tower rather than a 1954 motor inn. County records show the seller had already stitched the property together from three separate folios along Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard, Auramar Street and Belmar Street, roughly 1.18 acres in South Florida’s tightest beachfront corridor. That assemblage, carrying zoning good for a 541-unit tower, is what let El-Ad pay 15 times the seller’s 1995 basis while still needing $40 million of the seller’s own capital to bridge the deal, a structure that signals how thin construction and bridge financing remains for large beachfront redevelopment sites even as land values climb.

The numbers

El-Ad paid $60 million, with $40 million in seller financing from the entity tied to Levy and Man, who bought the site for $3,925,000 in a multi-parcel deed recorded Dec. 26, 1995. The site sits in Fort Lauderdale’s ABA (A-1A Beachfront Area) zoning district, entitled for 246,989 square feet and up to 541 units at a base height of 200 feet, with an additional 40 feet available if 60 percent of the units function as hotel rooms. The 1954 lobby carries a historic preservation agreement with the Broward Trust for Historic Preservation that any redevelopment will have to work around.

What’s next

El-Ad has not filed a site plan, and the seller financing gives the company time to decide between a straight residential tower, a hotel-heavy build that unlocks the extra 40 feet of height, or some hybrid that keeps the preserved lobby as an amenity space. Watch Fort Lauderdale’s development review portal for the first site plan submission, and watch whether El-Ad brings in a construction lender to take out the seller note before it needs to convert entitlements into a permit.