From Icona to Icondos … The Real Plan for Wonderland?

PRINTED IN THE OCEAN CITY SENTINAL. AUGUST 20, 2025

Eustace Mita, the developer behind the proposed “Icona at Wonderland” high-rise on Ocean City’s boardwalk claims he wants to build a 255-room, five-star resort hotel. But let’s be honest—does anyone in town really believe that? Condos seem to be the much more likely outcome.  Here’s why:

First, the hotel economics don’t appear to add up. In a Sentinel article back on March 5, 2025, Dan Gilman, an investment banker with extensive experience in real estate and public-private partnerships, went through the numbers, explaining why a project like this simply doesn’t pencil out as a hotel.  There’s been no rebuttal—not from the developer, not from the city.

And no wonder. Based on Mita’s stated build cost, and his staffing requirements, we have been told he would need an annual average room rate above $500, with annual occupancy rates that are north of 60%.  Even if he was full for the summer at premium rates, his offseason occupancy rate likely still needs to be above 50%.  

Have you taken a drive around Ocean City in December through March?  It is lovely, if you enjoy the quiet, some solitude, and have a tight social circle.  However, the Boardwalk is mostly dark, and many of the commercial spaces are as well.  And the hotels are either closed or very lightly occupied.   It’s hard to imagine how his hotel could achieve these occupancy rates and room rate numbers.

Second, a true five-star resort doesn’t work in Ocean City.  By definition, a five-star hotel needs to offer services like spas, fine dining, concierge staff, and valet parking whenever it is open.  As noted above, Ocean City is largely quiet from December through March. To meet luxury standards, the hotel would need to be fully staffed and operational during those empty months. That’s not economically realistic.

Then there’s parking. A hotel of this size, with 255 rooms and staff, would need at least 400 or more parking spaces according to industry standards. But there’s no space for that. We have heard one solution - car lifts, which is stacking cars on top of each other. Picture a wedding letting out its guests at this resort, and a hundred people trying to retrieve their vehicles through a robotic lift system. It would be chaos. It would take hours. It’s unworkable.

And while Mita runs small hotels, he’s never built one from the ground up—at least to our knowledge.  He has rehabbed existing ones.  What he has built from the ground up is luxury housing. That’s where his track record lies. That’s where he appears to make his money.

Perhaps most telling of all: when asked if he’d deed-restrict the property to guarantee it remains a hotel—not condos—he reportedly said no.

Last, Mita seems suddenly content with accepting “rehabilitation” status instead of “redevelopment”—even though redevelopment offers 30 or more years of tax abatements, while rehabilitation offers only five. Why give up decades of potential tax savings? Simple: if his real plan is to build condos, then he won’t be on the hook for taxes; his condo buyers will be. 

If you follow this trail of breadcrumbs, you don’t end up at the grand entrance of a five-star hotel. You end up at the uninspiring lobby of a seven-story condo complex that would likely be only seasonally occupied and won’t bring any meaningful economic benefits to the boardwalk or local businesses.

Let’s stop pretending otherwise.