Why a Funky Old Motel at Mile Marker 17 Just Became One of the Most Valuable Parcels in the Lower Keys
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
If you have grabbed a sunset drink at the tiki bar behind Sugarloaf Lodge, launched a kayak from the marina, or eaten at South of the Seven on a Friday night, you already know the property does not look like $45 million. The rooms are small. The furniture has been there since before most guests were born. The dolphin stories get told to anyone who sits at the bar long enough.
Three different outlets have now covered the sale, and all three led with the same two facts: the asking price, and the celebrities who once passed through. Paul Newman talked Kenyon College with the owner's son. Hunter S. Thompson flushed lit M-80s down the toilets and terrorized the housekeeping staff for a couple of years running. Those are good stories. They are also not the reason the number is this large.
Sugarloaf Lodge sits on 10.6 acres at 17001 Overseas Highway, listed by Lisa Swanson of The Agency Florida Keys alongside Jamie Bederak of The Agency Miami. The property currently holds 31 hotel rooms. Divide the $45 million ask by those 31 rooms and you get roughly $1.45 million per key, the figure that made it into the trade press.
But the listing is not selling 31 rooms. It is selling 31 rooms plus the vested right to build 24 more, for a total of 55. Run that same $45 million across all 55 potential keys and the price per room drops to roughly $818,000, a little over half what the headline number implies. The gap between those two figures is the actual story. Whoever buys this parcel is not primarily buying a funky old motel with a tiki bar attached. They are buying entitlement, and in Monroe County that is the scarcer commodity.
Those 24 additional keys are not new construction rights invented for this sale. They are rooms the Lodge actually had and lost to Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Monroe County allows destroyed hotel capacity to stay vested rather than disappear from the books, which means the right to rebuild those units has been sitting on this parcel for two decades, waiting for an owner with the capital to use it. In a county where new hotel-room allocations are handed out slowly and rarely, a bundle of 24 already-vested rooms attached to one deed is not something a buyer can easily replicate somewhere else on the highway.
That is the part every rewrite of the press release skipped. It is also the part that determines what this stretch of Overseas Highway could look like years from now, regardless of who signs the closing documents.
The Lodge itself dates to the late 1950s, built by a Pennsylvania coal company that had been dredging canals and platting the residential streets of Sugarloaf Shores. It changed hands in 1973, when Lloyd and Miriam Good relocated from Philadelphia and bought the property outright, raising their four children on site while running it as a working motel and marina. That is the ownership era locals actually remember. The Lodge today is held by an entity called Miriam BG, led by the Goods' children John Good and Caren Ward, along with nieces Jessica Duncan Wex and Katchen Elizabeth Duncan.
John Good has talked about what those decades were actually like, past the celebrity name-dropping.
"Crazy times. It was the '70s and '80s."
That is the whole quote, and it tells you more than a paragraph of description would.
Two dolphins lived in the bay by the Lodge during those years. Dolly had escaped the U.S. Navy and was smart enough that Jacques Cousteau studied and wrote about her, though she never warmed to performing and eventually swam off once the Goods removed the nets keeping her penned in. Sugar, the other dolphin, liked the shows and stayed until her death in 1997.
Newman came through and ended up talking college with a teenage John Good, who was headed to the same school Newman had attended. Thompson stuck around longer, long enough that Good calls him part of the family for a couple of those years, pig pranks and lit firecrackers included. One of those pranks made it into Thompson's own writing, in "Songs of the Doomed."
Strip away the anecdotes and here is what a buyer is inheriting on the operating side:
None of that is glamorous. It is also the actual infrastructure that makes this stretch of highway function as a gathering point rather than just another motel on U.S. 1. Depending on which map you check, this address falls right at the line locals draw between Upper and Lower Sugarloaf, and businesses here have listed themselves under both names over the years. The island's own geography is looser than the county line suggests, which is part of why nobody agrees on exactly where one Sugarloaf ends and the other begins.
This is not the first oddball landmark to come out of this particular stretch. About a mile northwest of Highway 1, near this same mile marker, stood the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower, built in 1929 by developer Richter Clyde Perky in an attempt to solve the Lower Keys' mosquito problem by importing bats to eat them. The bats flew off the first night and never came back. The tower stood anyway, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, until Hurricane Irma toppled it in 2017.
A failed mosquito-control experiment and a working motel-marina-restaurant complex, both born a stone's throw from each other at mile marker 17. Whatever else changes at Sugarloaf Lodge, that pattern of ambitious, slightly strange projects taking root right here is not new.
As of this writing, no buyer has been confirmed. The listing remains active with Swanson and Bederak. What we do know is that the 24 vested rooms make this a fundamentally different kind of sale than a straightforward motel changing hands. A buyer looking to preserve the Lodge as it exists today is competing, at least on paper, against the economics of a buyer who wants to build out the full 55-key entitlement. Which direction wins is not something anyone can responsibly predict from a listing sheet.
What is worth watching, if you live nearby, is whatever gets filed with Monroe County over the next several months. Development rights this size do not sit unused for long once someone has paid to acquire them.
If you are curious about what a sale like this could eventually mean for property values or land use along this part of Sugarloaf Key, that is exactly the kind of question Key West Sherri tracks day to day. Let's Connect.
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Sherri Blasingame
336 Duval St Key West, Florida 33040