Metronomic had big plans for West Grove. They may be on hold after Chapter 11 filing.
Two years ago, a little-known developer named Ricky Trinidad swept into Coconut Grove with ambitious plans to remake Grand Avenue in the village’s historically Black section. He promised passenger drones to ferry around residents of his developments and started spending big to acquire land. But not much else happened.
Now the Coral Gables-based firm he manages, Metronomic Holdings, faces several foreclosure suits and has filed for reorganization in federal bankruptcy court. The picture laid out in its Chapter 11 filing is not pretty: A list of Metronomic’s 20 largest unsecured debts tops $91 million, including $488,538.46 in unpaid property taxes and $1.5 million to Miami-Dade County’s environmental regulation agency. Listed creditors also include mortgage holders, contractors, architects, lawyers and Miami-Dade Water and Sewer.
The filing doesn’t list assets, but says the firm has 100 to 199 creditors and $50 million to $100 million in estimated assets and liabilities. The biggest listed debt is $51,304,168 in loans from Qidian, a Virginia investment company that specializes in crowdfunding. The voluntary petition was filed in U.S. District Court in Miami on Sept. 23 by Aleida Martinez Molina, a partner at Weiss Serota Helfman Cole Bierman.
Metronomic did not respond to a request for comment. Martinez Molina said she could not comment. Trinidad founded Metronomic in Chicago, but said in a 2018 interview with the Miami Herald that he had sold it to investors and was working for the firm as an executive.
The bankruptcy petition, which protects the firm from creditors as it attempts to right its finances, casts a long shadow over Trinidad’s big plans for several key blocks along Grand Avenue, a once-vital commercial and residential corridor for the West Grove that’s now mostly vacant land after years of demolitions and evictions. News of the petition was first reported by the South Florida Business Journal.
In 2018, Trinidad said he had a deal to purchase a collection of distressed lots along Grand for $25 million and announced a massive $74 million redevelopment project, including a hotel, shops and a mix of luxury and affordable apartments in more than a dozen buildings. Prolonged litigation over control of the lots had foiled several previous attempts at redevelopment.
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The announcement raised eyebrows in Miami’s development community, where Trinidad, a Chicago transplant, was a virtual unknown. Since arriving in Miami in recent years, Trinidad has completed small apartment buildings in Little Havana and the Grove, as well as scattered houses. But by his own admission, he had never tackled anything at the scale of the Grand Avenue project.
After the last property claims were settled, Trinidad announced in June of 2019 that he had closed on the purchase of four key parcels for $6.3 million and would soon start construction. Earlier, Trinidad had announced plans for a boutique hotel on the site of a former gas station on Grand.
But lawsuits by suppliers, contractors and mortgage holders against Metronomic and its affiliates started piling up, suggesting the firm was running into money problems. Metronomic has not started construction on any of its Grand Avenue projects, though it has others underway elsewhere.
According to its website, the firm has 17 projects in the pipeline: Six multifamily developments, including affordable housing and senior housing developments; an office project planned for Little Havana and three retail and office projects in Coconut Grove. It also lists seven student housing developments across Little Havana, the Health District and Coconut Grove. It’s unclear how many of those are under construction, but some of the projects are the subject of active lawsuits by lenders and contractors who claim they’re owed money by Metronomic or its affiliates.
In January, B and B Grove Properties, a partnership of prominent mutual fund manager Bruce Berkowitz and insurance magnate William Berkley, filed a foreclosure action against a Metronomic affiliate over a chunk of the key Grand Avenue parcels Trinidad had closed on seven months earlier. B and B Grove claims Metronomic owes $5,026,000 in principal and interest. The case is open.
On Sept. 18, Wilmington Trust sued Metronomic principal Kelly Bream and other investors over one of the firm’s finished projects, the GroveHaus apartment house on Bird Avenue. The suit alleges Bream failed to make payments on a $5,750,000 mortgage.
Both the B and B and the GroveHaus debts are included on Metronomic’s list of big creditors. Other large creditors include Fuse Funding, which holds $17.7 million in mortgages.
This story was originally published September 29, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
