r56, I think the property's new owners are thinking bigger... they want to create a gay village like Wilton Manors, but in Orlando. They're going to demolish the old hotel, build a new one that will be on par with The Gardens next door, and a strip mall with 2 or 3 small bars, 1 or 2 big ones, and a warehouse-sized dance venue like Manor, along with a half-dozen restaurants & gay-oriented stores (think: Leatherwerks, RockHard, etc).
Once that's accomplished, they test the waters with a condo that's cheap to build, but *could* become expensive due to proximity. If it does well, the million-dollar lofts along the lake will be coming as well. They're probably *already* buying nearby ghetto properties.
If you think it can't happen... I remember back around 2004 when the first few $600k-850k houses went up a block behind Georgie's Alibi, and thinking that whomever bought them would have to be certifiably insane, because at that point, one bad hiccup that closed Alibi & Boom, and those houses would have instantly lost 2/3 their value (or more), because back then, they were LITERALLY surrounded by a sea of run-down duplexes inhabited by poor black people.
I wouldn't write off the possibility of a cheap nearby gay hotel, either. Once former-PH gets demolished & rebuilt as de-facto GayCelebration®, it'll only be a matter of time until the owners of a nearby rundown motel kick out the poors, repaint the rooms, and advertise heavily to tehGayz.
There's another factor: Brightline. In another year or so, MCO to downtown Fort Lauderdale will become a painless 2:08 (give or take) train ride, which I think will MASSIVELY increase in-state gay tourism as guys who would have otherwise spent the weekend at home, bored, watching Netflix will instead trade places with a few hundred guys from across the state and spend the weekend partying instead. Driving to Orlando/FtLauderdale after work in 6pm traffic sucks... a painless ~2hr train ride w/20-30 min Uber trip at the end is another matter ENTIRELY.
I think Brightline will *profoundly* boost Florida's off-season tourism (gay AND straight)... first, by encouraging Floridians to travel when it would otherwise be dead, and second, by making it NON-dead, so people from places like New York will consider travel to Florida then, too.
Of course, I might be totally wrong about the intentions of Lion (the new owners). But AFAIK, they're a gay investment group with substantial investments in Wilton Manors, and I fully expect them to try and replicate Wilton in Orlando.
