Tiger takes $54M mortgage on Jupiter Island home

STUART — Golfer Tiger Woods has taken out a $54.5 million mortgage on his still-being-built home on Jupiter Island, apparently to pay for his divorce settlement with ex-wife Elin Nordegren.

According to a mortgage filed Aug. 27 with the Martin County Clerk of Courts, Eldrick Woods, the golfer’s given name, promised to repay the debt by Jan. 15, 2016, to JRD Florida Ventures LLC, a “Virginia limited liability company.”

According to the Virginia Secretary of State website, Dennis I. Belcher is the registered agent for JRD Florida Ventures; he’s also a partner in McGuireWoods, the Richmond, Va., law firm that represented Nordegren in the divorce.

JRD Florida Ventures’ address is listed as 8815 Conroy Windemere Road in Orlando; Woods’ address is listed as 8934 Conroy Windemere Road in Orlando.

Woods and Nordegren finalized their divorce Aug. 23 at the Bay County Courthouse in Panama City. Woods’ signature on the mortgage was witnessed by a Bay County notary the same day. The mortgage is dated Aug. 25.

The amount of the divorce settlement has not been disclosed. Estimates have been as high as $750 million, but the total now has been said to be more than $100 million.

The mortgage is for the property and “all the improvements now or hereafter erected” at 463-467-469 S. Beach Road, a plot with frontage on both the Atlantic Ocean and Intracoastal Waterway where Woods has been building a 9,000-square-foot, two-story mansion named Sand Turtle.

Woods spent $44.5 million in 2006 and 2007 to purchase the 12-acre Jupiter Island site through separate deals under various Orlando-based company names.

Paperwork filed at the county Clerk of the Courts Office in December indicated construction was expected to be completed by Oct. 1. Later paperwork asked for a time extension to build tennis courts and a pavilion and said construction of an oxygen therapy room and a practice golf course could take a year.

Nordegren and Woods were married Oct. 5, 2004, in Barbados and have a 3-year-old daughter, Sam, and an 18-month-old son, Charlie.

The marriage began to unravel publicly on Thanksgiving night when Woods drove his SUV over a fire hydrant and into a tree outside the couple’s home near Orlando, setting off revelations that golf’s biggest star had been cheating on his wife through multiple affairs.