Gulf American Land Corporation
Gulf American Land Corporation (GALC) was a land development company in Florida founded by brothers Leonard and Jack Rosen. During the late 1950s and 1960s, GALC was the largest land sales company in the United States. The company is noted for its role in the development of Cape Coral, Florida, and pioneering the sales method of instalment land purchases.
In the late 1960s, GALC sold 173,000 mi (278,000 km) of swampland, dubbed Golden Gate Estates, to about 40,000 buyers. Many buyers bought plots that were still underwater. They paid for them in monthly installments and acquired ownership of their properties when payments were complete. Gulf American built 183 mi (295 km) of roads and 813 mi (1,308 km) of flood control canals advertising Golden Gate Estates as semi-improved land, though there were no utilities or public services. The fill resulting from digging flood control canals was used to raise the land level to comply with minimum building elevation legal requirements. The canals drain 233 billion US gal (880 billion l) of fresh water a year into Naples Bay, damaging the coastal saltwater ecology while causing the groundwater table to drop 2 ft (0.61 m) to 4 ft (1.2 m). The Florida Department of Business Regulation adopted real estate development reforms in the 1970s because of such abuses.
In 1969, GALC (which by then had shortened its name from Gulf American Land Corp to Gulf American Corp) and its sister companies were taken over by General Acceptance Corp.
Leonard and Jack Rosen began their business career as street vendors in Baltimore. They used the earnings of their original business and high interest loans advanced by Chicago financier, Jay Pritzker to set up a real estate development company selling yet-to-be developed plots of land in the northwest Florida Everglades to prospective homeowners from the Northeast and Midwest. This involved the Rosen's 1957 purchase of 103 sq mi (270 km2) of land located in pristine mangrove swamps for $678,000 and the establishment of offices in strategically important Northeastern and Midwestern towns and cities, where prospective customers were enticed by using high-pressure sales techniques to take a day trip to Southwest Florida to inspect developments and commit to a purchase.
...
Wikipedia