Drive east on Lincoln Drive past Scottsdale Road and you'll pass two fenced-off properties within about a quarter mile of each other. One is a 120-acre construction site with a perimeter wall that's been standing since 2018. The other is a shuttered 1954 hotel that's been closed since 2020, its parking lot empty except for the occasional contractor's truck. Most residents lump them together as "the stuff that never gets finished on Lincoln." That instinct is wrong in a way that actually matters.
The Ritz-Carlton Paradise Valley and the old Smoke Tree Resort are both years behind whatever schedule was announced when they started. But they're delayed for opposite reasons, and understanding which kind of delay you're looking at tells you something real about which one opens first.
Same Street, Two Different Kinds of Stuck
The Ritz-Carlton project, known formally as The Palmeraie, has all the permissions it needs and ran out of money. The Smoke Tree redevelopment has plenty of money behind it and is still working through Town Hall.
Here's how the two compare as of this fall:
| Ritz-Carlton / The Palmeraie | Smoke Tree Resort | |
|---|---|---|
| Developer | Five Star Development | Walton Global |
| Site | 120+ acres, Scottsdale Rd & Lincoln Dr | 5 acres, 7101 E. Lincoln Dr |
| Core problem | Lender dispute, Chapter 11 bankruptcy | Ongoing entitlement changes |
| Villas/units | 80 villas, mostly built and selling | 82 to 95 rooms, still not broken ground |
| Last confirmed movement | Liquidity deal with lender, July 2026 | Room-count amendment approved by planning commission, 2025 |
| What's actually built | Perimeter wall, villas, Shea Homes' Azure community | Nothing yet, existing hotel still standing vacant |
That table looks like two projects at similar stages. They aren't. One has poured concrete and closed sales. The other hasn't reported a groundbreaking despite the original hotel having sat closed since 2020.
The Money Problem
The Ritz-Carlton's history goes back almost two decades, through a 2008 referendum, a recession that shelved the whole thing, and a 2018 groundbreaking that finally got shovels moving after multiple pushed-back opening dates. Villas started selling in 2022, with the first release reportedly generating around $240 million in reservations in a single day. By 2024, some of those villas, ranging from roughly 1,700 to 4,800 square feet, were complete and being occupied by their owners. The hotel itself, a 215-room resort with a 400-foot pool, kept slipping.
Then the money side collapsed. Five Star's lender, Madison Realty Capital, moved toward foreclosure over a $585 million loan the developer had taken out in 2023. Five Star filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on November 4, 2025, which under federal law creates an automatic stay that halts foreclosure while the company reorganizes its debts.
Here's the part that surprised even people tracking the project closely: bankruptcy didn't freeze everything. In early December 2025, a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge in Texas ruled that villa sales could proceed without interference from the lender, with proceeds held in a court-supervised escrow account. Sales and closings kept moving. According to Wikipedia's tracking of the case, at least one villa reportedly sold for $6.48 million while the bankruptcy was still active.
By July 2026, Five Star had reportedly reached a term sheet with Madison Realty Capital to provide liquidity during the restructuring, according to Phoenix Business Journal reporting. That's a step toward resuming hotel construction, not confirmation that it's happened. The developer's own claim, cited in reporting on the filing, is that hotel infrastructure is essentially complete and only interior finishes remain, pending court approvals. An April 2025 industry update had pointed to a spring 2026 opening for the resort. That date came and went without an opening, which fits the pattern this project has followed since 2018: every projected date has been provisional until the resort actually opens its doors.
What the Town Actually Controls
There's a detail in the bankruptcy filing that explains why this dispute matters beyond the developer's balance sheet. The Town of Paradise Valley has a direct financial stake in the hotel getting finished, since it collects tax revenue once the resort opens. When the town originally allowed villa construction to move ahead of the hotel, it did so on the condition that Five Star show "substantial progress" on the resort itself.
Once hotel construction stalled, the town stopped issuing certificates of occupancy on completed villas, according to reporting from AZBEX. Five Star has argued that freeze halted closings on 40 villas worth roughly $150 million. That's the real leverage point in this story. It isn't just a lender squeezing a developer. It's a municipality using occupancy permits to keep a stalled hotel project honest, and a developer arguing in bankruptcy court that the freeze itself is what's costing everyone money. The court's decision to let villa sales resume, held in escrow, was a way to unlock some of that value without letting the town's leverage disappear entirely.
The Permission Problem
Smoke Tree tells a completely different story, and it's worth knowing if only because the property sits close enough to the Ritz-Carlton site that the two get confused in casual conversation.
The original Smoke Tree Resort opened in 1954 and closed for good in 2020, after a prior owner's plan for 150 rooms failed to gain traction. Walton Global, a Scottsdale-based real estate investment firm, bought the five-acre site in June 2022 with a plan to rebuild it as an 82-room boutique hotel. The concept included two dining spaces from Matt Carter, the restaurateur behind Zinc Bistro, The Mission, and Fat Ox, and organizers pitched the whole thing as "the Living Room of Paradise Valley."
The Town Council approved a special-use permit for that plan on January 11, 2024, which read at the time like the last real obstacle before construction. It wasn't. By June 2025, Walton was back in front of the planning commission asking to increase the room count from 82 to 95, which required another round of review, and the commission approved that amendment the following month. That's the most recent public update on the project we could confirm, roughly a year and a half after the council's original approval, with no groundbreaking reported in that window.
That's not a financial failure. Walton Global manages billions in assets and isn't fighting off a lender. It's a slower, less dramatic kind of delay: a developer continuing to refine scope and design through the town's approval process, one amendment at a time, while the physical building sits untouched.
Reading the Fences Correctly
If you're trying to guess which project actually opens first, the Ritz-Carlton's problem is arguably closer to resolved. Its entitlements were settled years ago. What's left is a financing and legal process working through a specific, documented court timeline, and that process has already produced concrete movement, from the December 2025 escrow ruling to the July 2026 liquidity deal. Smoke Tree's obstacle is less visible and less predictable: it's still inside the town's review process more than three years after Walton Global bought the site, with the scope of the project still being adjusted as recently as last year.
Neither project has a confirmed opening date worth repeating here, because every date attached to either site so far has been revised at least once. What's worth knowing is the difference in kind. One fence hides a company working through bankruptcy court to finish something it already built most of. The other hides a company still deciding, with the town's input, exactly what it's going to build.
For more on how Paradise Valley's development pipeline connects to what's happening in the resale and estate market, Smith Real Estate tracks these projects as part of its ongoing coverage of the town. If you're curious what a specific stretch of Lincoln Drive or Mummy Mountain means for your own property's value, request a market valuation and we'll walk you through it.
