Former Borders entices new tenant

The folks at Florida Medical Clinic, a multi-specialty medical firm with 36 locations in the Tampa area, have a thing for books.

The firm, with 33 medical specialties and more than 215 providers, recently acquired its second former Borders bookstore, for continued expansion. The latest acquisition was the Brandon Borders, a 22,585-square-foot space on Town Center Boulevard. Florida Medical paid $2.05 million for the building, states a release from commercial real estate firm CBRE, which helped arrange the sale. The purchase follows Florida Medical Clinic's 2012 acquisition of the former Borders Carrollwood store. The firm paid $3.85 million for that space, a 30,000-square-foot building on Dale Mabry Highway.

A national mega-bookstore, Borders filed for bankruptcy in February 2011. The firm began to liquidate stores nationwide in the months after the Chapter 11 filing. That included eight stores on the Gulf Coast, from the Brandon location to one in Fort Myers and another in Naples. The closures put nearly 200,000 square feet of commercial real estate space back on the market, and in many cases the stores remain empty toady. The former Sarasota Borders, for instance, on a high-traffic intersection, Bee Ridge Road and U.S. 41, is one of the vacant properties.

But Florida Medical Clinic sees potential inside Borders. Florida Medical Chief Administrative Officer Gus Taylor says the two purchases are somewhat of a coincidence, and are geared more toward location and layout, not the previous tenant. On location, both stores are near a lot of the firm's patients and are in high-traffic areas. And on layout the spaces are wide-open shells, which cuts down on construction and renovation costs.

“Those locations are perfect for us,” Taylor tells Coffee Talk, “and what we are trying to do.”