An under-construction mansion at 757 Island Drive on Everglades Island in Palm Beach traded for $93.3 million on May 21, 2026 — the second-priciest sale ever recorded for a Palm Beach home on the lake side without ocean frontage. Property records show 757 Island Dr LLC, a company tied to investor Randall Smith of Alden Global Capital, as the seller. The buyer is a trust managed by Miami attorney Mark Meland, financed with a $70 million, 15-year mortgage from Bank of America. The seller’s 2021 acquisition basis was $39.5 million for the corner one-acre lot, putting the transaction at 2.4x basis across approximately five years.
The property carries Palm Beach Architectural Commission approvals from 2022 for a roughly 11,600-square-foot mansion with nautical detailing. Public records reflect an approximately 13,000-square-foot constructed footprint with about 1,400 square feet of covered outdoor living space and eight bedrooms. The corner one-acre parcel has 371 feet of waterfront on the Intracoastal Waterway. Everglades Island is the island within the island — a narrow Intracoastal-encircled enclave on the lakefront side, accessed by a single causeway, and historically priced at a meaningful discount to the comparable South Ocean Boulevard ocean-frontage tier.
The basis-multiple math
The Randall Smith / Alden Global Capital position is a textbook spec-development trade in a market where land-value pricing has detached from improvement-cost pricing. The Smith-tied LLC paid $39.5 million for the lot in 2021. Five years and one architecturally approved 11,600-square-foot mansion later, the closing print is $93.3 million. The implied land-and-shell yield is approximately $53.8 million on a project that did not require speculative buyer interest at sale — it required a single qualifying trust buyer with a $70 million bank-financed loan, which Bank of America provided at 15-year tenor. That is a banked, comparable, replicable transaction structure, not a one-off whale trade.
For lakefront mid-block comps on Everglades Island and the immediate Intracoastal corridor, the 757 Island Drive closing establishes the new ceiling. The recent Palm Beach lakefront cluster — Douglas Durst’s $14.9 million teardown sale on 1333 North Lake Way (May 5), Pamela W. Starret’s $72 million lakefront close earlier in the year, the $51.7 million Manalapan ocean-to-lake Mennella transaction — now reads against $93.3 million as the high-water mark for non-oceanfront Intracoastal acreage. The premium for ocean-to-lake versus pure lakefront has compressed, and the premium for newly constructed versus tear-down land has widened.
Buyer side: the Mark Meland trust structure
Mark Meland, a Miami attorney, is acting as trustee for the buyer entity. The structure — attorney-trusteed acquisition with a substantial bank mortgage on what is effectively a primary-residence asset — fits the wealth-preservation pattern that has dominated Palm Beach trophy purchases through 2025–2026. Roughly two-thirds of Palm Beach condo closings have been cash; trophy single-family closings increasingly use mortgaged structure when the principal preserves liquidity for other allocations. A $70 million BofA mortgage at 15-year tenor against a $93.3 million asset is a 75 percent LTV pattern aligned with a private-banking principal-preservation thesis.
What it tells the post-season market
The Palm Beach post-season window — late April through June — has historically traded thin liquidity at the trophy tier. The 757 Island Drive close establishes that the trophy tier is still trading, that banks are still underwriting at the eight-figure mortgage level, and that the comp table for Everglades Island and the comparable Intracoastal lakefront enclaves has moved up. The town’s median single-family sale stands at $12.9 million; the average is $9.8 million; five-year appreciation sits at 118.2 percent — the strongest of any major Florida market. Three Palm Beach listings remain at $100 million or above, with a $205 million asking-price ceiling.
The $93.3 million Everglades Island print moves the Palm Beach trophy comp set materially. Mid-block lakefront, with documented architectural approval and a newly constructed eleven-thousand-square-foot improvement, is now priced inside a $90-million-plus band — and the trade closed without ocean frontage. That is the read for the second half of 2026.
Sources verified via: The Real Deal (Miami, May 22, 2026); Hoodline; Commercial Observer; Palm Beach County property records; Premier Estate Properties Palm Beach Luxury Market Report 2026; Bank of America mortgage filing records.
From the Borro desk: The local read above is consistent with the 2026 trophy-asset market signals captured by Phillips Geneva XXIII.
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