A Luxury Missive Of The Palm Beach Hedge Fund Association |
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News & Views For The Affluent Lifestyle |
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Citadel Moves Into Neiman Marcus Building On Worth Ave
Ken Griffin continues storming into South Florida, with Citadel poised to take over the former Neiman Marcus building in Palm Beach.
The Chicago-based hedge fund is setting up an office in the former 48,578-square-foot department store at 151 Worth Avenue, according to Bloomberg.
In May, an affiliate of Jeffrey Camp paid $78 million for the three-story building completed in 2000, records show. Neiman Marcus vacated the property in late 2020, after the department store chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As part of the reorganization, Neiman Marcus closed stores and shed $4 billion in debt.
In June, Griffin announced Citadel is relocating its global headquarters from Chicago to Miami, where the hedge fund is partnering with commercial real estate developer Sterling Bay to build a new office tower in the city’s Brickell area. Citadel is reportedly the buyer of a commercial site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive that sold for a record $363 million.
Palm Beach has experienced an influx of hedge fund firms and managers in the past year, lured to the Sunshine State by Florida’s lax Covid restrictions and friendly tax environment. During the pandemic, Citadel traders stationed in Chicago and New York moved down and worked from the Four Seasons Palm Beach.
Citadel employees residing in Palm Beach will work in the new office on Worth Avenue.
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Welcome To Palm Beach Pursuits!
Palm Beach Pursuits is the monthly luxury publication of the Palm Beach Hedge Fund Association.
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Real Estate Pursuits
Palm Beach Home Sold For $3.8 Million In 1998, Asking Over $150 Million
The real estate bull market continues to surge to absolutely remarkable levels on Palm Beach and the surrounding areas as this Wall Street Journal article demonstrates with Rush Limbaugh's home:
The Palm Beach home of late conservative talkshow host Rush Limbaugh is reportedly being discretely shopped around for between $150 million to $175 million, according to individuals familiar with the proposition The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The oceanfront property which Limbaugh purchased in 1998 for $3.9 million through a limited liability company, sits on about 2.7 acres on North Ocean Boulevard. Built in the West Indies style, the property includes several structures and has access to 250 feet of ocean frontage.
Zev Chafets reported in his 2010 book “Rush Limbaugh: An Army of One” that the main house encompasses about 24,000 square feet of space and was, for the most part, decorated by Limbaugh himself......
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Billionaire Ken Griffin’s Colossal Palm Beach Estate Riles Up Neighbors
Some of Griffin’s neighbors aren’t worried about the buying binge. The real estate billionaire Jeff Greene, who lives just a few houses from Griffin, told The Daily Beast that the Citadel CEO is just exercising his free market rights: “If he wants to buy a bunch of property, that’s his prerogative.”
Greene thinks that Griffin’s massive estate is actually a win for the neighborhood because it will ensure the area remains quiet. To those protesting the development, he said, “I can’t imagine they’d rather have 10 cars pulling out every morning than one.”
Squabbling seems to be part of life in Palm Beach. The Thorntons, who have been among the most visible opponents to the plan, were ironically the subject of previous complaints themselves. In 2017, an LLC affiliated with their next-door neighbors, Bradley and Lamia Jacobs, filed a suit alleging that the couple had engaged in a “campaign of harassment and bullying,” including by calling the police on the Jacobses’ landscapers and letting their dogs “run wild.” Three years prior, the Thorntons had sued the Jacobses over a property rights dispute. (There have been other petty-sounding lawsuits as well; the cases have turned into a legal morass, with some of the matters still pending.)
Lurie’s complaint centered on a separate topic. His lawsuit contends that the town failed to obtain consent from all affected property owners before it decided to reroute beach access for residents who live on the lagoon side of the street.
Instead, his filing claimed, the town eliminated Lurie’s old method of accessing the beach via a private road in the middle of Griffin’s estate, forcing him to travel a greater distance on foot or—gasp!—scout for parking on South Ocean Boulevard “and then walk (with beach equipment in hand) along the heavily-trafficked” street. The litigation is ongoing......
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Yachting Pursuits
The Age Of The Superyacht
On the docks, brokers parse the crowd according to a taxonomy of potential. Guests asking for tours face a gantlet of greeters, trained to distinguish “superrich clients” from “ineligible visitors,” in the words of Emma Spence, a former greeter at the Palm Beach show. Spence looked for promising clues (the right shoes, jewelry, pets) as well as for red flags (cameras, ornate business cards, clothes with pop-culture references).
For greeters from elsewhere, Palm Beach is a challenging assignment. Unlike in Europe, where money can still produce some visible tells—Hunter Wellies, a Barbour jacket—the habits of wealth in Florida offer little that’s reliable. One colleague resorted to binoculars, to spot a passerby with a hundred-thousand-dollar watch.
According to Spence, people judged to have insufficient buying power are quietly marked for “dissuasion.”
For the uninitiated, a pleasure boat the length of a football field can be bewildering.........
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State Of The Luxury Watch Industry 2022
Annual Swiss watch export figures recently published by trade body Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry (FH) reached an all-time high of CHF22.3 billion in 2021, with CHF 21.2 billion of that for wristwatches alone. The bumper year for Swiss watch exports – a proxy for the luxury watch industry as a whole – has just been dissected by Morgan Stanley in its yearly report on the Swiss watch industry published in in collaboration with LuxeConsult, the watch industry specialist consultancy I founded.
The key piece of good news in the report: the business has returned to pre-Covid level of sales, with Swiss watch exports up 31.2% compared to 2020, and even 2.7% higher than 2019. The bad news is that despite an increase of two million watches in the year, the volume of exports remains 4.9 million units below that of 2019.
Still wearing the crown
Unsurprisingly, Rolex remains the leader amongst Swiss watch brands with 29% of market share and an estimated turnover of CHF8 billion in 2021.
In second place is Cartier with CHF2.39 billion, which corresponds to a 40% year-on-year increase. Because of that, traditional second-place finisher Omega is now third with CHF2.2 billion in sales.......
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Sponsorship opportunities of the PBHFA, as well as banner/advertorial promotion on Palm Beach Pursuits are currently available for select financial firms & luxury purveyors.
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