Merrimac Ventures

Merrimac Ventures is a Fort Lauderdale real estate investment and development firm that focuses on resort and mixed-use projects. It started in the late 1970s as an import/export business run by Bob and Ramola Motwani in St. Charles, Mo., then bought its first hotel on Fort Lauderdale’s A1A strip in the mid-1980s. Sons Nitin and Dev Motwani later pushed it into bigger deals. The portfolio includes the Four Seasons Fort Lauderdale, work at Miami Worldcenter and a planned Four Seasons resort in Telluride, Colo. With Driftwood Capital, Merrimac leads Riverside Wharf, a $350 million hotel and nightlife complex on the Miami River that closed a $145 million construction loan in October 2026.

Two distinct activities sit under Merrimac Ventures. One is ground-up development, which the firm breaks into site acquisition and analysis, site plan design, land entitlements, market analysis and product design, and then project management and construction. The other is acquisitions: value-add repositioning, land development, bank-owned REO purchases and opportunistic core and core-plus buys, with property and asset management kept in house afterward. The company puts more than $3 billion of completed development behind it and describes an active pipeline above $3.7 billion.

Asset classes have widened well past the hotel business it started in. Multifamily is now described as a core line, alongside select condominium development, retail, mixed-use and self-storage. Riverbend Self Storage and CubeSmart Oswego sit in the portfolio list next to the apartment and hotel projects. After the late-2000s crash the firm bought a 500-home single-family rental portfolio in Atlanta, an entry it frames as an opportunistic move into a new asset class when market conditions were unusual rather than a standing strategy.

Geography is broader than the Fort Lauderdale base suggests. The portfolio includes the Westin Tysons Corner in Virginia, a Hilton in Durham, a Crowne Plaza in Melbourne, Florida and a Canopy by Hilton in Tempe, and the company states holdings across mid-Atlantic and southern states. Florida work spans Waldorf Astoria Residences in Pompano Beach, Society Las Olas and 317 N Federal in Fort Lauderdale, Soleste Seaside, the Leena projects in Ocala and Plantation, and several Miami Worldcenter components including Caoba, Caoba Phase II, Paramount MWC, The Crosby and 600 Miami Worldcenter.

The stated underwriting posture is conservative: long holds, conservative metrics, detailed market analysis and job costs vetted in detail, under what the firm calls an owner mentality applied to construction quality and durability of design. Partners are grouped on the site as residential, hotel and capital, though none are named there.

The management bench is deeper than the family names usually quoted. Ramola Motwani is chairwoman, Dev and Nitin Motwani are managing partners, Dale Reed is managing director, and Juan Pedro San Martin is senior vice president of development, supported by two development managers, an acquisitions manager, a controller and a manager of legal affairs. No phone number is published. The office is at 17 NE 4th Street in Fort Lauderdale, and inquiries are routed to separate addresses for construction, media and accounting.