New industrial planned for Lee

As the Lee County industrial vacancy rate shrank to 6.5% in the first quarter of this year, brokers and users alike have lamented that new product hasn't come online.

Randy Krise aims to change that.

Krise's Kismet Industrial Park LLC intends to develop as much as 270,000 square feet of new flex and warehouse space on a 25-acre tract in Cape Coral, beginning early next year.

“We know there's a shortage of industrial space in Lee County and in particular in Cape Coral,” says Krise, who controls the Krise Commercial Group brokerage and development firm in Fort Myers.

Kismet Industrial, a group comprising Krise and Bahram Khoobehi of Fort Myers; Feridun Kubilay of New Orleans; and Dariush Khoubehi of Skokie, Ill., paid Everbank $705,000 for the vacant land last month, according to Lee County property records.

That price works out to $2.61 per usable square foot on a development basis — a tenth of what market-rate space often requires to develop.

The property, on Littleton Road, was owned by Tri-State Development LLC prior to an Everbank foreclosure, records show.

Krise says roughly $1.5 million in water and sewer infrastructure has been installed. His group intends to amend an existing site plan agreement.

“The main thing that attracted us was the value of the property,” Krise says.

Industrial vacancy in Cape Coral at the end of March was 6.5%, according to CoStar Group data, though the availability of warehouse space was even tighter — at 3.9%.