But he said he still holds a 50 percent stake in Church Street Station, and he vowed to continue redeveloping the downtown Orlando dining-and-entertainment complex despite the economic downturn and his financial problems.
"There is a clarity in going broke. You find out who your friends are," Kuhn told about 70 business people attending an International Round Table meeting in Orlando.
Kuhn, 48, who spearheaded a good portion of the city center's redevelopment during the past decade, said he is trading "a lot of property" in an effort to essentially give himself a fresh start, though he cautioned that the economy's weakness is far from over.
"The consumer is just starting to understand," he said, as the stalled real-estate market morphed into a much larger debt crisis that circled the globe and is now hitting home on main street.
At the height of his expansion in early 2007, he said, he had 70 employees, $650,000 a month in overhead expenses and holdings in Orlando and Jacksonville. He said that when he saw access to secondary-market capital drying up in June, he began cutting costs but could not get ahead of the downturn.