Water adds to Cloisters' woes

Leaks require replacing all 500 windows at the luxury condo complex, finished late, with half the units unsold.

By BRYAN GILMER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 26, 2000

ST. PETERSBURG -- When it rains, it pours over the windowsills of some of the high-priced condominiums in the Cloisters on Beach Drive.

In other units, the leak is more of a trickle. But that's hardly a comfort to buyers who spent $340,000 to $1.5-million for a luxury condominium on a waterfront street in downtown St. Petersburg.

The problem runs much deeper than just a few leaks. All 500 windows in the building have to be replaced, and the problems have caused the lender to send in a special consultant to make sure the local group that built the Cloisters gets it straightened out.

"This building should have the Mercedes of windows," said Brian Smith, the consultant for Litchfield Financial Corp. of Massachusetts, which bankrolled the $20-million project.

The window leaks are one more agonizing problem for a project already in financial difficulty. The building was finished at least eight months late, and half of its 32 units remain unsold.

Instead of foreclosing on the building, Litchfield executives decided to renegotiate the terms of the loan, work with the partnership of four local businessmen to fix the project's problems and get the remaining units sold, Smith said.

"We're in a mode of recovering the investment," Smith said. "Making money is not on anybody's mind."

The local partners -- former St. Petersburg mayors Randy Wedding and Robert Ulrich and real estate brokers Robert Strickland and Jack Bowman -- conceived the idea for the project four years ago. It was to be the first downtown high-rise condominium project in a generation.

They said at the time they hoped it would spark a development boom.

That it did. JMC Communities built the Florencia to the south, and Vinoy Place is being built just to the north. Both are luxury condo projects that compete with the Cloisters and have made it harder for the Cloisters to sell all its units.

Because the building was finished behind schedule, some people who had planned to buy a unit changed their minds, Smith said. Though not all of the windows leak, word of problems at the Cloisters may have scared away some potential buyers.

Metric has agreed to bear the cost of the window replacement, Strickland, Wedding and Smith said. It is uncertain how long the project may take.

"We want the whole thing fixed right," Strickland said. "Patio doors, all that is going to be replaced. It's going to be an unfortunate situation where it's going to take some time. Also, there is going to be some disruption of the existing tenants. What we are demanding of Metric is that they go in there with the proper teams and give us a schedule."

Wedding said that even with no profit, he will work hard to make sure the project is finished correctly.

"We'd be really pleased if we got done and we had a lot of happy people living there," he said.

A woman who answered the phone Tuesday at Metric Constructors' Tampa office said that only division manager Rick Furr could answer questions about the Cloisters' problems. She said he was busy and could not come to the telephone.

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