The buyer of the tract, Coral Gables-based Gold Royale Asset, whose principal, Luigi Annese, is based out of Miami and Venezuela, is probably buying the property to land-bank it, says Butera. Annese is in Venezuela and currently unreachable, he says.

Butera says that Annese paid cash for the 46 acres, which was once part of the 400-acre Colbert Lane PUD, which was never developed. The 46- acre tract, which is entitled for office and retail development, is part of what was to be a 300,000-square-foot mixed-use development. Over the last few years, most of the land for Colbert Lane was sold off, as the market for residential and commercial development dried up, says Butera, who is son of Ben Butera, one of the principals of Colbert Lane, LLC. He is now marketing the last 32 acres of the property.

Although he did not want to categorize the 46-acre sale as "distressed," Butera says that, "if we didn't have this sale, we would be in trouble with the bank in 12 months." He declined to name the lender who Colbert Lane must repay.

The community of Palm Coast was designed as a retirement community and founded in 1969 by the ITT Community Development Corporation. That is why it has a lot of retirees, says Butera, but about 15 years ago, families started moving in.

Flagler County, where Palm Coast is located, was still growing through 2009, according to the US Census Bureau, which reported on March 23, 2010 that the county ranked fourth among the 100 fastest growing counties in the US from 2000 through 2009, ending 2009 with a population of almost 92,000. But there are few jobs in Flagler County and Palm Coast, so lots of people who live there, work in Jacksonville or Daytona, says Butera. In the beginning of 2010, Flagler County's unemployment rate was nearly 17%, according to CNN.

Originally Colbert Lane was to have 450 single family units, but Butera and partner Vince Viscomi, sold off roughly 300 acres of land for single family development in two phases, phase I in 2006 and phase II in 2009, for a total of $6 million, says Butera.

The elder Butera and Viscomi, who bought the 400 acres for Colbert Lane around 2001, also sold off the 23-acre, multi-family parcel in 2005 for $1.4 million. That buyer sold the land to a second buyer for $7.4 million in August 2005. With the second sale, although no infrastructure had been put in, the owner had obtained further entitlements for the property, says Chris Butera.

Nothing was ever built on the Colbert Lane site, at least nothing above ground, although roads and water and sewer lines were put in, says Chris Butera. The land is a few miles from a residential subdivision with high-end homes he says.

Publix, with Jacksonville-based Regency Centers Corporation, a shopping center REIT, had a piece of the commercial portion of Colbert Lane under contract in 2007, says Chris Butera. At the time that Regency and Publix were going through due diligence, the site was in competition with another site a quarter mile to the east, he says. Rather than build a Publix in the Colbert Lane PUD, Regency decided to build a store at that other site.

Walgreen also had a site under contract in 2004 and again in 2008 at the Colbert Lane development site, says Chris Butera, the first time for $1.3 million for two acres and the second time, also for two acres with a $2.2 million price tag, but the market had slowed down by then. "In 2004, the company said that there were not enough rooftops in the area to warrant building a store," he says. Then, some time in mid-2008, they decided not to make any more new investments in stores in Florida, says Butera.