Royal Westmoreland Launches Petrea Heights

Construction is full steam ahead on the condos known as the “Royal Apartments” started last year, but a little thing like that has not stopped Royal Westmoreland from launching yet another major development project on its sprawling 750 acres first thing this year 2008. This time they are offering a mix of villas and townhouses starting at US$1.65M which they are calling “Petrea Heights.” As the name suggests this new development will sit on a hill overlooking the west coast and the Caribbean Sea, and is high enough to take full advantage of the trade winds coming in from the east off the Atlantic. Thus all residences will have ocean or golf course views or both. If you are lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of this development, Royal Westmoreland will pay your US$200K deposit or give it to you as a discount.


This latter offer of the discount is testimony to how competitive real estate has become in Barbados even at the luxury high end. Royal Westmoreland is aggressively fishing for clients in the same pool as Sugar Hill, Apes Hill and Black Bess (Banyan Tree) which are all within a few miles of each other (Sugar Hill and Royal Westmoreland actually only across the road from each other). Perhaps the competitiveness of the market was another one of the reasons why Sandy Lane with its 1000 acres recently announced that it was putting on hold its US$1B plan to build over a hundred luxury villas on its latest golf course - the Green Monkey. “Monkey see - monkey [don’t] do[?]”