The project is set for construction in the southern portion of the island in the New Year. The first stages of pre-sale will also begin then.
The complex is being constructed by the National Tourism Development Fund (Fonatur) to encourage investment and detonate the consolidation of the integral tourism project of Marina Cozumel.
“The idea is to encourage development and investment in Cozumel, which in turn, will allow the consolidation of the integral tourism project of Marina Fonatur to be detonated,” said Raúl Bermúdez Arreola, in charge of Centro Integralmente Planeado (CIP) Cancun.
The project will consist of six stages and will be under a joint venture scheme where Fondo Nacional de Fomento al Turismo (Fonatur) will contribute three properties with a marina front located in the south of the island.
The federal agency has initiated meetings with both national and foreign investors to contribute capital.
Based on project planning, the agency says they expect the first stage of 48 condominiums to be on the market for pre-sale at the beginning of the New Year. The first stage of 48 condos will be constructed on a 10,000 square meter property. The entire project includes 300 condos in the six phases.
Fonatur is hoping the project will contribute to the strengthening of tourist segments aimed at a market with greater purchasing power, while encouraging sports tourism through long vacation periods on the island.
The Cozumel Marina is operated by Fonatur and is located in the south of the island. It currently has capacity for more than 300 boats of up to 60 feet in length and a confined space for 150 nautical service providers, among other amenities.
In 2019, Fonatur announced that it had not yet been able to commercialize 70 percent of the lots that make up Marina Cozumel, so they proposed to change the business scheme.
Alejandro Varela Arellano, Fonatur’s legal director said since the beginning, the project has faced various problems including Hurricane Wilma and the H1N1 (swine flu) influenza virus, in addition to an erroneous marketing strategy.
Given this, they decided not to sell the remaining lots, but to offer them as an asset to investment partners with whom Fonatur would act as partner.
The strategy changed to offer the already developed lots to investors who remain aware that hotels, shopping centers, residential developments and restaurants can be built in the Marina, explained the official.
It is, he said, the new business vision that Fonatur intends to implement, no longer developing and selling properties within previously planned real estate complexes, but maintaining ownership of the land and partnering with potential investors so that the business dividends benefit the government coffers for 10, 20, 30 years, or as long as the profitability of a certain real estate development lasts.
He added that they already have offers for the establishment of restaurants under this new public-private partnership scheme.
“One would have to imagine the dividends that Cancun could generate if instead of having sold and developed, Fonatur had remained as a partner, maintaining ownership of the land,” he commented.
Today, Cancun is a clear example of the revaluation of land with an increase in capital gains of more than 800 percent per square meter, added Varela Arellano.
He explained that this same scheme is being applied in the territorial reserve that they still have in Cancun and in other destinations around the country, where Fonatur had served as a developer of strategic projects.
In 2008, Fonatur laid the first stone for the marina, which at the time, was projected to attract $191 million USD in private investment in addition to attracting 36,000 new foreign visitors a year, with foreign exchange estimated at $45 million yearly.
The first stages for the pre-sale of the Marina Cozumel condo complex will begin in early 2023.
TYT Newsroom
