By Kristin Buttenhoff
Nine Women in a Month Can't Make a Baby
That's a line Frank Schilling's accountant used to say to him, years ago, when Frank kept pushing to get a project built faster. "Nine women in a month can't make a baby, Frank." He still repeats it, because it captures the whole thesis of Cayman real estate in one sentence: you cannot rush construction, no matter how much money or motivation you throw at it.
Frank is the developer behind Secret Beach in West Bay, and he's developing Sea Glass, a planned 157-unit project on more than 6 acres of oceanfront in Bodden Town, along with the Port Zeus marina project on Cayman Brac. Before any of that, he built and sold five domain-name businesses to GoDaddy, which is a roundabout way of saying: when Frank tells you how to make money or what works, it's probably worth listening.
I sat down to speak with him about the part of Cayman real estate almost nobody explains properly: pre-construction buying, and why the earliest buyers so often walk away with the biggest wins.
The gap that creates the opportunity
Permits take however long they take. Concrete cures on its own schedule. Everything on this island arrives by boat or plane, and crews can only work so many hours before the heat wins. Supply is capped, no matter what. Demand isn't. That widening gap is where the opportunity lives.
Developers know this better than anyone, which is exactly why the earliest units on a project are almost always the cheapest they'll ever be. Every developer wants to make as much money as possible, Frank told me. That never changes. What changes is how much fear is mixed in with that inaugural ambition, and how it shifts over the life of a project which can often stretch over many years.
At the very start, before there's a permit or a bank willing to lend, a developer is at his most cautious: no sales yet and nothing built. A bank needs proof that a project will work before it lends against it. That single galvanizing window (often months long) is when prices are lowest.
As units sell and the project gains momentum, that fear fades and ambition takes the lead. "Greed is most tempered by fear in the very beginning of a project," says Schilling. The same developer who needs your deposit on day one will barely blink at a lowball offer once he's down to his last few units.
Frank pointed to the penthouse at Watermark, nicknamed "The Pearl," as an example of that late-stage confidence. It's publicly listed today at $43.8 million, a long way from where Watermark's original 2018 price list started. As Frank put it: "Do you know how you sell a condo for $42 million? You say no to $36 million. Not everyone has that strength, stomach, or courage."
How to turn $1 into 5
According to Frank, in 2018 he put down $300,000 to reserve multiple units at an ultra-premium tower on Seven Mile Beach. "It was early. Few understood the deal." Across three units he bought that day, he says he had roughly $1 million in early deposits committed for a total of $15 million of real estate. "I don't recall paying another dollar for two years." Eventually, he told me, he sold one of those three contracts before completion, for more than $10 million, double its original asking price.
By his account: a cumulative deposit of around $1 million turned into a $5 million gain on that single unit. He sold prior to closing, assigning the contract itself to a later buyer at a slight discount to the purchase price. That's the part Frank says most buyers miss about pre-construction: "You can sell your contract before you ever close on it, and you only need to put down a tiny percent of the price to control the whole asset." It's not a story about any given project here. Rather, it's about the ecosystem that allows developers to secure the funding they need to get their projects off the ground. Purchasers avoid the stamp duty and closing costs that only apply once a project reaches completion. Inflation and time to construct, he says, insulate early purchasers from downside, and early-stage developer fear assures upside.
In his telling, most of the upside in this game happens in the years between reserving a unit and actually owning it, while the only money you ever had at risk was the deposit.
The three moments that matter
Frank breaks the buying window into three.
- Day one, off the very first price list: cheapest prices, least certainty, nothing built yet, and a developer who is, by his own account, at his most cautious.
- Midway through construction, once there's something to walk on and touch, but before the best units are gone.
- And right before completion, from a buyer who'd rather sell at a discount than write a check for stamp duty.
All three can work, Schilling says. "You don't need to be first, just early, ideally before that fear turns into confidence."
The one thing that must be true
None of it works if the developer doesn't deliver. Cayman and other jurisdictions have had high-profile projects stall out completely after the developer ran into serious financial trouble: buyers had delayed recovery of deposits and the sites sat half-built for years. It's not a hypothetical.
Frank's advice was blunt: Agents who have been in this market for a long time, who are committed to maintaining their craft, know who actually finishes what they start and who has something to lose. "Look at the history, not the renderings." A developer with their own money on the line and a name they care about protecting is playing a different game than one who doesn't have local ties or their own capital. In the Cayman Islands, developers as a whole cannot build fast enough for the demand that exists. It's just the math of aspirational small island living, where a lack of interstate freeways and small infrastructure can cause long construction timelines.
Buying early from a developer with a proven track record can be an enticing opportunity to build up one's investments locally.