GreenPointe Communities breaks ground on $1 billion Quay project

Four years after buying a 15-acre, waterfront site in downtown Sarasota for $27 million, Jacksonville’s GreenPointe communities has begun infrastructure work on the property.

The company’s planned Quay project, in all, will contain roughly 700 residences, 175 hotel rooms and nearly 200,000 square feet of office and retail space valued at $1 billion.

“It’s been a little more than three years in the making to get us to this day,” Grady Miars, president of GreenPointe Communities LLC, the Quay’s master developer, says at a May 23 groundbreaking event to kick off infrastructure work.

“This site provides an excellent opportunity to do what we think we do well, which is create a sense of place.”

Miars told the Business Observer following the event that while GreenPointe is concerned that the economy might turn down before the project is complete, the Quay’s “grid system” should buffer against recession somewhat.

“The block plan that we’ve developed for the property allows us to do infrastructure work and bring projects on incrementally, if necessary,” he says. “So if the economy were to slow down at some point, we also could slow down our pace of development there.”

Miars adds the Quay project — GreenPointe’s first urban, mixed-use development following a series of single-family communities around the state — won’t likely reach build out until 2023 or even 2025.