I guess we all tend to dream about doing something we never did before, and thinking that there are things where you simply can’t fail. 2 of the activities that usually come to mind are hotels and restaurants.
How can you go wrong if you have a nice place on the ocean? People will be flocking to you, because you would be taking good care of them and life will become like living in paradise. A vacation that pays for itself. And people buy small mom and pop motels and fail…
And restaurants… People will always want to eat, and you cook for your friends, and they all love it, and always tell you that you should have opened restaurant and start make money rather than do nothing after you retired. And people open restaurants.
I read once in our local paper that 81% of new restaurants in our area go out of business within the first 2 years. Would be interesting to know how many of them are still there after 5 years, but I do not know that.
I read today that Vince Carter’s in Daytona Beach was sold for $4.5 Million. They closed the restaurant a few months ago, and now there is a new owner.
It opened with great fanfare in 2010. Cost them $11 Million to build this 11,000 sf beautiful restaurant in … nowhere and in the time when economy was slowing dramatically… Yes, the NBA star's name was supposed to be bringing people in, and, probably, if not for the name, it would have closed doors way sooner...
Location was a future development area, but developers put all their plans on halt. All develoment in the area was on hold.
We have just got rid of a small restaurant we had, and were still feeling the pain and yet relief. When we learned about the new high-end restaurant coming to this area, we were sure it would fail, and only argued how fast it could happen.
We did not give them a lot of time. They ran much longer. I suspect that it is unlikely they were ever making money on it beyond the first couple of months. I do not even believe that they were making ends meet, but the NBA star Vince Carter probably kept it afloat hoping for better times to come.
Hi mom was in charge of operations, and she honestly said that it took all her time, and she could not do it anymore. They put it on the market for $5.5 Mil and sold for $4.5 Mil.
The crazy part is that recently there was an announcement of the biggest residential development in the county coming right to this area. Plus a new Outlet Mall opened their doors there a few months ago, another residential complex is coming out of the ground now… And they could not wait any longer…
Their loss is Stonewood Restaurant’s owner – the buyer – is a huge gain. And Stonewood will be doing fine there. They have the name, have the following, and their timing is impeccable. Funny, but they do not need the NBA star name, they most probably do business as Stonewood.
Interestingly, when this happen, those losers feel such a relief, that it really can be a happy moment when they close the door and walk away and try to forget the whole thing ever happened to them...
Image by Danny Bollinger via Flickr.com Creative Commons
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I am a condo broker in the area, so feel free to contact me if you would like to be close to Stonewood, or simply would like to be by the ocean
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