New Investor Takes Over Troubled New York Timeshare Resort
Friday, July 12, 2013
The 11-acre beachfront resort, Gurney’s Inn Resort and Spa in Montauk, New York has changed ownership with a sale earlier this summer. The Long Island, New York timeshare resort has been a Montauk landmark since the 1950’s.
George Filopoulos is a name you may not know outside Metrovest Equities in Manhattan, where he is the investment company’s president. In fact, Metrovest is a strong New York investment and development company known for being deeply committed to thoughtful urban planning. As Metrovest explains on its website, the company has, “has successfully acquired and redeveloped obsolete institutionally-owned properties; they’ve restructured, rehabilitated, and re-energized challenging HUD subsidized properties; and they’ve envisioned highly praised plans for urban renewal.”
Where once the ocean-side New York timeshare resort had some 5700 owners, it has in recent years dwindled to fewer than 2000. But the failure of the resort’s ownership to pursue timeshare resale of defaulted ownerships has been only one of numerous points of contention between Gurney’s Inn Resort and Spa timeshare owners and its management. Issues ranged from high maintenance costs, to special assessments, including a $21 million assessment in 2008, to management so troubled that the resort was featured last fall on a Travel Channel episode of “Hotel Impossible,” with host, Anthony Melchiorri.
According to the East Hampton Star, Filopoulos promised the remaining Gurney’s Inn Resort and Spa timeshare owners to, “regularize the finances” of the hotel and spa. Additionally, he offered to roll back the maintenance charges and see that the ongoing lawsuit regarding the property was concluded if 51 percent of them agreed to his terms. Filopoulos’ terms required individual owners to commit to one of the three options:
- Turn in their shares in December in exchange for a 20-percent maintenance reduction for 2012.
- Turn over their shares and keep their units until the end of 2017, with no maintenance or assessments during that time.
- Keep their units until the end of 2017, and take their chances that the inn will be resold at a profit after that point.
Eighty-seven percent of owners accepted one of the three options. Filopoulos reportedly seeks to restore conditions and operations of the resort and resell it by or before 2018.
