by Michele Gillis
Staff Writer
Lon Walton’s career has brought him full circle and has taken him back to his roots in real estate.
Walton, whose name should be familiar to all local builders, is the managing director for South Beach Land Trust, which recently acquired Paradise Key South Beach development at the southern end of Jacksonville Beach,
Walton’s father, Bill Walton Jr., was a builder/developer whose career spanned more than 50 years in Northeast Florida, including being president of the Northeast Florida Builders Association in 1962.
The younger Walton grew up in the business with his dad, spending his youthful summers working construction with his father and learning the job, literally from the ground up.
Walton Jr. was a founding partner in Paradise Key and today, his son is running the show. The development is on the southern edge of Jacksonville Beach and is just north of Butler Boulevard. There are 62 homesites and homes run in the $500,000 range.
“My dad had built apartment properties and had a relatively large home building business, too,” he said. “Every summer from the age of 13 until I graduated college, I worked in his areas of business. I worked on maintenance crews, lawn crews and framing crews. One summer I took some properties that had been boarded up due to a soft real estate market and fixed them up and sold them. I ran a subdivision one summer.
“One of the things my father told me while in college was to get all the licenses I could. He wanted me to do it while I was still in the mode of studying. I got a broker’s license in 1984 and contractor’s license in 1985.”
Along the way, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
“I had spent a lot of time in the real estate industry,” said Walton. “My dad was in real estate, my brother was in real estate and I thought economics made sense at the time.”
Walton took the whole year of 1980 off with the thought of seeing the real world before he entered the real workforce.
“I spent part of the year in Washington working in Rep. Charlie Bennett’s office,” he said. “I traveled and then went to work at Merrill Lynch in New York. It was a worthwhile year. After I got out of school, I went back to New York and worked for the First Boston Corporation, an investment bank, for a year. Then I came back to work with my dad in 1983.”
He worked for his father until 1986 when Walton Jr. sold the company to Centex.
“That’s how Centex got into Jacksonville,” he said. “I stayed on with Centex for a little while and then did some real estate projects with my father again.”
In 1988, Walton went to work for Florida National Bank.
“I was involved with problem loans and disposing of problem assets, kind of like what is going on now,” he said. “Florida National was acquired by First Union in 1990. The last year I was there, 1994, I worked in the commercial lending area because the real estate problems had kind of wound down.”
Then he did some more real estate and started a golf mail order company, which he did for about four years.
“While I was doing that, I was doing some work for a friend who had started an investment fund, so I was doing a little bit of everything. In 1998, I went to work at the investment fund full-time for six years,” he said. “I was fascinated with the investment world and really enjoyed that a lot. I still had real estate interests, but I was primarily doing investment research until 2004. In 2004 to 2006, I worked for another investment fund in New York and commuted there one week a month.”
He left the real estate business, came back, and left again. In 2006, he came back out of necessity.
“In 2006, my father became ill and I saw the writing on the wall that he couldn’t be involved in the businesses that he had, so at the beginning of 2007, I really became immersed in his real estate family businesses.”
The elder Walton passed away and Lon took over the business.
One project was Paradise Key.
“When this came online, it couldn’t have been a more difficult time,” said Walton. “When I got involved in 2007, there was debt on the property and fortunately an investment group, South Beach Land Trust, approached the bank about buying the debt. They learned of my involvement in it and asked me to manage it for them. They bought the debt and ultimately, the property was deeded to South Beach Land Trust.”
Walton spent a few years weathering the storm while still involved in other businesses. The property was deeded to South Beach Land Trust in 2009 and in the spring of 2010, he started to get more optimistic on the market.
“Over the last year, we made a lot of changes to the property and really tried to work on making the property ready to sell,” said Walton. “During the course of the year, we got Glenn Layton of Glenn Layton Homes involved to build the homes and added little things to it. We added signage and a sales center and are now ready to sell.”