Builder sinks cash into second Alba tower site 

Developer paying $1.5 million each for low-rise condos that sold for about $200,000 a few years earlier; neighbor stands to cash in.

Another developer is pursuing a high-rise to cash in on the boom in residential real estate along West Palm’s North Flagler Drive waterfront.

The developer of Alba, a 55-unit, 21-story high rise under construction at the site of the former Scuba Club at 4708 N. Flagler Drive, is assembling more waterfront land immediately to the north for Alba Reserve. 

Plans have not yet gone to the city. 

But Alba developer Kenneth Baboun of BGI Cos. has pitched a 400-foot-tall tower with a seven-story parking garage to neighbors.

“This height is not appropriate for our historic residential neighborhood,” the Northwood Harbor Association said in an email to members. Residents already are upset over disruption from Alba construction and worried about the trend along North Flagler with developers converting narrow waterfront lots into high-rise residential towers.  

Alba Reserve would further that trend. 

On a single day in July 2023, Baboun’s company bought five of 16 condos at 4800 N. Flagler. His company paid $7.5 million in those five transactions, an average of $1.5 million per unit.

But he doesn’t yet own all the land he’ll need for Alba Reserve.

Separating those condos from the Scuba Club site is a home on less than an acre owned by landscaper Justo Naranjo and his wife, Beatriz Corrales.

And Naranjo and Corrales beat Baboun to the other 11 condos in the four two-story buildings north of their home at 4800 N. Flagler. 

They bought earlier and paid far less, about $217,000 per condo, property records reveal.

They amassed them between August 2018 and October 2020, before Baboun’s plans for the Scuba Club had emerged.

Baboun didn’t get waivers from the West Palm Beach City Commission to allow Alba on the 1.7-acre Scuba Club site until January 2022. City planners later conceded they should have been limited to 44 units.

Plans for Alba Reserve are underway but designs are not yet final, an Alba spokeswoman said. 

“The team at Alba and BGI Companies believe in the growth of the Northwood neighborhood and as such, are continuing to invest in the area,” Baboun said in a statement. “We are currently designing the tower and working closely with the city of West Palm Beach and the Northwood Harbor Association to prepare for submitting plans by the end of the year.” 

If the city greenlights the project, that would mean a big payday for Naranjo and Corrales.

They invested $4 million, including $1.6 million for their 7,500-square-foot home, but could sell for more than $40 million.

Naranjo, a son of Cuban immigrants raised in a low-income neighborhood in Palm Beach County, is reluctant to jinx the deal by talking about it. 

“I’m looking forward to the negotiations coming up in the future to make this happen,” he told Stet News. “I don’t want to cry victory and then nothing happens.”