Founded by the Phipps family, the private banking firm has deep roots in Palm Beach but is relocating to downtown West Palm Beach. A limited liability company bought the building on Royal Palm Way.
Darrell HofheinzPalm Beach Daily News
Bessemer Trust — the historic financial arm of the prominent Phipps family and a key player in the development of Palm Beach and other parts of Florida — has sold the Henry Phipps Building, its longtime home on Royal Palm Way.
The office building at 222 Royal Palm Waychanged hands in an off-market transaction for a price recorded at $18.665 million, according to the deed posted Aug. 12 on the Palm Beach County Clerk’s website.
Thesale of the 35-year-old building comes as New York City-based Bessemer Trust, a private banking firm, prepares to move its local offices across the bridge into downtown West Palm Beach.
Founded in New Jersey in 1907 as Bessemer Trust Co., the institution has had a presence on the island for 95 years, according to a statement from the company.The company's Palm Beach office was initially established in 1929 as Palm Beach Trust Co., a subsidiary of Bessemer Trust Co., before changing its name in 1977 to Bessemer Trust Co. of Florida.
Today, the firm has moved far beyond its role of solely overseeing the fortunes of the Phipps family to become a “private multifamily office,” as it is described on its website. The company has 22 locations that manage more than $200 billion and serve 3,000 “client relationships.”
The deed shows Bessemer Building Corp. sold the property to 222 RPW LLC, a Florida limited liability company managed by Delaware-registered General American Capital Investments LLC, business records show. The Delaware connection effectively cloaks the identity of anyone in control of the new ownership, thanks to the state’s strict corporate privacy laws.
Bessemer Trust was the sole tenant of the Midtown building, which the company completed in 1989 after buying the property the year before for $1.4 million, according to courthouse records.
With underground parking, thebuilding has two stories and a total of 11,694 square feet, property records show. Based on that measurement, thebuilding traded at $1,596 per square foot.The land measures about two-fifths of an acre and is the fourth lot west of South County Road.
Mark D. Stern signed the deed to sell the building as president of Bessemer Building Corp. He could not immediately be reached.
The buying entity has a mailing address on the deed in care of real estate attorney Brad McPherson of the Gunster law firm on South Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach. He declined to discuss the buyer or provide any specifics about the sale.
Broker Lawrence Moens of Lawrence A. Moens Associates handled the transaction, his office confirmed. Moens could not be reached for comment.
Bessemer Trust planning move from Palm Beach to West Palm Beach
After nearly a century on the island, Bessemer Trust is planningto relocate to the One Flagler, the ultra-luxury towerunder construction at 154 Lakeview Ave. The 25-story tower is being built by Palm Beach developer Stephen Ross’s Related Ross company near the west end of the Royal Park Bridge, about a mile away from the Palm Beach building on Royal Palm Way.
A message requesting comment for this story from a spokesperson at Bessemer Trust was not immediately returned.
A timeframe for the company’s move has not yet been announced. It’s unclear if the firm will continue to do business in the building on Royal Palm Way during the interim or if it will maintain any type of presence in Palm Beach once the move is made.
Bessemer Trust is among a number of financial firms that have made plans to move to downtown West Palm Beach orhave already relocated there, raising the city’s national profile as a financial hub. Some promoters of the area have even dubbed the city “The Wall Street of the South,” its downtowngrowth spurred by the real estate boom of the past few years that has brought thousands of new residents to Palm Beach County.
The move to West Palm Beach would enable Bessemer Trust to serve the community “from a state-of-the-art office space that will fulfill the evolving needs of our clients and employees across generations,” according to a statement from the company that was quoted in May by the Palm Beach Post.
Bessemer and the Phipps family at one point owned a third of Palm Beach, its manager once said
Bessemer Trust Co. was formed in the early 1900s after Henry Phipps Jr. and his wife, Anne, experienced a $50 million windfall, thanks to the merger of Carnegie Steel Co., in which they had a financial interest, with U.S. Steel.
As Palm Beach social and architectural historian Augustus Mayhew wrote in an extensive series for the New York Social Diary website, the Phippses “structured their estates to be equally shared by their five children. In a letter to each of them, Henry Phipps mapped how his legacy would be distributed and the principles fostering his ‘Family Plan’ that evolved into the Bessemer Trust Company.”
Over the years, the Phipps family and Bessemer Trust amassed major land holdings and developed residential and commercial projectsthroughout South Florida.
At one point in the 1940s, Bessemer Properties, a company related to Bessemer Trust, was reportedly the single-largest landowner in Florida and perhaps the Eastern Seaboard, according to an interview Julian Field, the longtime manager of Bessemer Trust, gave to the Palm Beach Post in 1978.
Although the scope of their local land holdings is much smaller today, the family at one point owned a third of Palm Beach, Field told the Post.
The family's developments in town included the Phipps Plaza mixed-use enclave in Midtown; Everglades Island in the Estate Section; and, on the South End, Ibis Isle and the Par 3 Golf Course, which stretches between the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway. Nearby Phipps Ocean Park is named for the family.
Among the family’s other holdings were 20 miles of oceanfront in Palm Beach County as well as land near Lake Osborne; land in West Palm Beach and Riviera Beach; 8 miles on either side of Miami’s Biscayne Boulevard; land in theLoxahatachee River area and parts of Leon County; and between 30,000 ad 40,000 acres in Martin County, Field told the Post.
Palm Beach building nods at architecture of Phipps family's Casa Bendita mansion
The Phippses and their heirs also built for themselves some of Palm Beach’s most famous mansions, including the long-gone Casa Bendita, an oceanfront estate designed on the North End by noted society architect Addison Mizner for John “Jay” S. Phipps, son of Henry and Anne Phipps.
The late Palm Beach architect Gene Lawrence designed the facade of Bessemer Trust's Royal Palm Way building to recall Mizner’s design for Casa Bendita, thanks to its tower element, arched colonnade on the first floor and a row of windows stretching the length of the second floor.
RoyalPalmWay isknown to locals as “BankersRow” because of the number of financial business that have offices and branches there.
The streethas the third-highest average asking price for commercial rents in the country, according to a study released in April by the commercial real estate and investment-management firm JLL.The street also is the top-dollar commercial corridor for rental asking prices in the state, the study showed.
RoyalPalmWay has an average "full-service gross asking price" for rents of $134.31 per square foot, according to JLL's Most Expensive Streets Report for 2024.
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This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Previous reporting by Alexandra Clough of The Palm Beach Post contributed to this report.
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Darrell Hofheinz is aUSA TODAY Network of Florida journalist who writes about Palm Beach real estate in his weekly “Beyond the Hedges” column. He welcomes tipsabout real estate news on the island. Email dhofheinz@pbdailynews.com, call 561-820-3831 or tweet @PBDN_Hofheinz. Subscribe todaytosupport our journalism.
