Welcome to the jungle
Ben Loomis
(Crain's) — Ben Loomis wants his own "Fantasy Island."
Taking a big step toward a dream he first hatched in college, Mr. Loomis paid $3.5 million in September for part of an island off the coast of Panama where he proposes an eco-friendly hotel/residential project.
Mr. Loomis, 37, a Chicago architect and Alabama native, acknowledges that some people thought he was crazy when he quit his job in 2007 to build a tourist spot in the jungle.
"My first thought was skepticism," says Ed Kiss, former chief financial officer at InterCapital Partners LLC, a residential developer where Mr. Loomis was a project manager. "He's a soft-spoken guy. I wouldn't expect him to make a leap like that."
But Mr. Loomis thinks he'll find takers.
"The eco-friendly hotel/resort market is a niche that a lot of people are recognizing," he says. "They're looking for more authentic experiences on vacation."
The 400-acre island, which is about five miles off the Pacific coast of Panama, is home to tropical forest, monkeys, boa constrictors and other wildlife, and it lacks electricity and running water. Getting there from Chicago requires two flights, a short cab ride and 50-minute boat trip.
"It's like stepping back 200 years in time. There's a surreal aspect to it," Mr. Loomis says.
He hopes to begin construction early next year on the $30-million first phase of up to 30 hotel rooms and 60 residential units of the project, called the Resort at Isla Palenque. He plans to power the development with a generator and wind and solar energy, and to tap an underground aquifer for drinking water.
Mr. Loomis hopes to double the $6.5 million he's already raised from friends and family, but before breaking ground he'll need a $17-million loan. At a time when U.S. developers of far less ambitious projects have trouble scraping up financing, he's counting on a Panamanian bank to back him.
Mr. Loomis first explored his plan for a "green" development on a remote island in his undergraduate thesis at Auburn University in Alabama.
About two years ago when the economy and InterCapital's business slowed, Mr. Loomis started searching for a new opportunity. He formed Amble Development LLC in September 2007 and spent the next month looking for property in Mexico and Central America.
Finding the island was tough enough. Closing the deal took about a year.
The property was owned by 15 members of the same family, and each of them had to agree to sell 40% of the island to Mr. Loomis, who has an option to buy the remaining acreage. Currently, a half-dozen people live on the island.
Mr. Loomis grew up in Huntsville, Ala., about 100 miles north of Birmingham. After graduating from Auburn in 1996, he moved to Chicago to work at Tigerman McCurry Architects. He spent a year there before leaving to start a design/build business with two buddies.
Mr. Loomis moved to Boston in 2001 to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned master's degrees in real estate development and architectural studies. From 2003 to 2007, he was a project manager at Chicago-based InterCapital, a small development firm that specializes in condominium and apartment projects.
Mr. Loomis and his wife, Frances Limoncelli, Amble's marketing director, run the firm out of one floor in their Lincoln Square two-flat. They won't move to Panama, where these days Mr. Loomis spends about half his time.
Adam Ducker, who's working with Mr. Loomis on the development, has been there and says the landscape is breathtaking. But he acted as a voice of reason when Mr. Loomis told him his plans.
"I said, 'You know what you're getting into, right?" says Mr. Ducker, a managing director at Robert Charles Lesser & Co., a Washington, D.C.-based real estate advisory firm that's working on the project. "It'd have been a lot easier to develop an industrial building in Naperville."
