The debut of the Hyatt Regency Coconut Point Resort & Spa might just guide south Lee County in the same direction.

“I think it will have no less of an impact than The Ritz had on Naples,” says Frank D’Alessandro, a commercial real estate broker with Grubb & Ellis|VIP-D’Alessandro. “The Ritz brought in a lot of high-end retail business and it also brought in a lot of executives who purchased homes. If you want to go deeper than that, really what it did for Naples was a lot of executives who happened to go to The Ritz, they ended up not only relocating their home to Naples, but their business to Southwest Florida.”

“It’s a quality issue,” says R. Scott Cameron, CCIM, president of Cameron Real Estate Services, and long active in the Naples business community. “I would greatly prefer to see The Ritz-Carlton and The Registry hotels and Hyatts than I would the lower-budget suites that you see in other parts of the state,” he says.

The quality of an area’s facilities and amenities sets the tone for how it will develop, and the classic example is just to the south of the new Hyatt — Naples, which is largely why the Hyatt snapped up that property.

“When William Johnson first made the proposal and followed through to build The Ritz-Carlton in Naples, people kind of thought ‘What, are you kidding? It’s a small town. There’re not enough people there and you’ll never fill it,’ “ says Cameron, who has lived and worked in Naples since 1974.

“Going there for the first time was like walking into the Taj Mahal for a lot of people because it was so much more glamorous … than you would expect for being in Naples,” Timmerman says. “It had a profound effect on North Naples as a whole over the years.”

Timmerman adds that he thinks the opening of the Hyatt will add that same level of excitement for people in Bonita Springs. “The only dissimilarity is that there are other resort hotels in the marketplace — not in Bonita Springs, but in Southwest Florida — whereas when The Ritz came here, there really wasn’t anything else that would be classified as a five-star hotel,” except, perhaps, the Naples Beach Hotel and Golf Club.

“The Ritz-Carlton certainly is one of the things that has helped set the tone of development quality in the Naples area,” Cameron says.

“When Westinghouse developed Pelican Bay, they went for the upscale market that didn’t necessarily exist here then. It was a quiet little town. But the fact that now there was a world-class facility located in such a beautiful, pristine place attracted people who could afford to follow through on further quality development in the market.”

Both The Ritz-Carlton and The Registry Resort, which opened about the same time, “were a success overnight,” he says. “There was obviously a pent-up demand.”

The family-owned Naples Beach Hotel, “has been there for years and is still a world-class facility, but at the time they didn’t have large conference facilities,” Cameron explains. “So, for instance, when we had our annual Chamber of Commerce banquet each year, we were all driving down to Marco Island to the Marriott. It was the only place that had large conference facilities.”

When The Ritz opened, word got around quickly — with the help of some clever marketing — and it helped set the stage for future development and for the quality of life in the area.