• 195,000 square feet existing
Buildings I - III
• 435,500 square feet planned for
construction Phase III
• 241,000 square feet future
development Phase II
www.eastgroup.net
Contact Gary Tasman or
Shawn Stoneburner of
Cushman & Wakefield at 239/489-3600
or e-mail gary.tasman@cushwake.com
center or business park will ultimately go,
say some of Florida’s leading industrial developers. A best guess can be as expensive
as the costs for buildings and land, unless
government agencies can agree to offer
some relief.
“The developer has to take a risk and
project what those costs will be,” says
Robert Krueger, regional director of First
Industrial Realty Trust in Tampa. Negotiations with local leaders over sharing such
costs can take up to a year, well beyond the
90-day due diligence period for a project,
he says.
It helps a developer’s cause if he has a
tenant or buyer lined up for an industrial
project that will create a certain number of
jobs, thereby opening the way for various
economic incentives, according to Krueger.
But if a project is being built purely on a
speculative basis, the developer is solely responsible for those costs, he says.
“It’s like taking a blank check into (
negotiations) with cities or counties, and you
don’t know what your true cost ultimately
will be,” he says. “It becomes very risky to
buy the land on that basis.”
A possible textbook example of that
process is an ambitious plan by Ryan Cos.
US Inc. to develop a 2.7-million-sf industrial complex called South Shore Corporate Park, along the west side of Interstate
75 in the south Hillsborough County town
of Ruskin. The Minneapolis-based developer completed its long-negotiated purchase of 302 acres for $28 million last year,
after which it had to come up with another
$25 million for road and drainage improvements in the area.
“We paid almost as much for the infrastructure as the land,” says Gary Bauler,
vice president of development with Ryan’s
Southeast regional office in Tampa who,
before joining the company, brokered the
land deal for CB Richard Ellis. The biggest
part of the cost is building a four-lane access road between State Road 674 and another local street, he says.
That road is currently under construction, with busy backhoes and giant drainpipes blocking access to Ryan’s first spec
building at South Shore, with 90,000 sf of
office and warehouse space. An oversized
Road Closed sign stands a few yards away
from a CBRE leasing sign.
“That wasn’t part of our marketing
plan,” Bauler scoffs about the building’s
