A Stock Brokerage Now Owns Nearly 2,000 Acres of Jamaica

• Barita’s real estate arm controls eight properties, seven sites
• A 1,600-acre eco-luxury project is planned at Green Castle
• The firm moved from acquisition into active development
• It bought its first Kingston site for $470 million in 2021

Barita Investments Limited, historically a securities dealer, has built a real estate portfolio spanning close to 2,000 acres across Kingston, St Mary and Ocho Rios, according to details disclosed at the company’s quarterly investor briefing. CEO Ramon Small-Ferguson described the firm as having moved from the acquisition phase to the development stage, a transition marked by concluding land purchases and now actively planning what gets built on them.

The portfolio’s scale breaks down into distinct projects at very different sizes. In Kingston, the adjoining Lady Musgrave and Argyle properties, including the former Eden Gardens site, span about 4.8 acres earmarked for an urban hotel, residential and business complex, alongside a separate mixed-use waterfront development on Harbour Street tied to the broader downtown Kingston revitalisation push. On the north coast, the numbers scale up dramatically: 275 acres planned for a hospitality and branded residential development at Reggae Beach in St Mary, 101 acres for a resort and residential community at Windsor Estate, and 1,600 acres for an eco-luxury, wellness-focused destination at Green Castle Estate.

The accumulation happened gradually, through Barita’s real estate fund vehicle MJR Real Estate Holdings. The Eden Gardens acquisition, the corner site’s history traces to entrepreneur Dr Henry Lowe’s Environmental Health Foundation, was bought for US$3.2 million, more than $470 million, in September 2021, with several MJR directors also holding Barita executive roles. A parallel 2022 announcement outlined a roughly $200 billion development plan including conversion of the former Ruins complex into a river attraction and a new Ferry, St Catherine warehouse, implementation then projected at 12 to 24 months to begin, five to seven years to complete.

Small-Ferguson was candid about why the shift from buying to building has taken years rather than months. Real estate takes a lot of work to put things together given the complex nature of some developments, the approvals process and also in bringing concepts to a stage where they can actually be developed, he said, confirming the company had also identified a dedicated executive to lead the real estate portfolio specifically. For a financial group whose core business was trading securities, nearly 2,000 acres of physical land now under active development represents a genuinely different kind of balance sheet risk, and a genuinely different kind of company, than the one Barita was five years ago.