Upscale Sarasota clothing boutique and its building up for sale

Naples/Fort Myers/Charlotte

A good week: LSI Cos. in Fort Myers has been busy. The commercial real estate firm announced a series of deals last week that it brokered, including several topping the million-dollar mark. Among the deals:

• A 2,954-square-foot office building in Naples. The property at 5395 Park Central Court sold for $1.29 million to DeWayne Lockhart Jr. The previous owner was Nala Properties, which paid $269,500 for the single-story building in 2019.
• A five-unit apartment building in Cape Coral. The property at 3913 S.E. 11th Place was bought for $1.03 million by an LLC with an Aventura address. The previous owner, Florida Home Visions, bought the property in 1990 for $150,000. According to its LoopNet listing, the apartment building sits on a canal and has five two-bedroom, two-baths units. The listing says the building has “substantial rental income upside, as current rental rates are significantly below market.” 

Drugstore deal: A Miami real estate investment firm has bought a Punta Gorda property with a Walgreens store on it. The buyer is an LLC named KO Wash which has an address that matches The Orion Real Estate Group of Miami in state records. It paid $4.28 million for the property at 3795 Tamiami Trail. The previous owner was Walgreens Co., which paid $2.75 million for it in 2000. According to a spokesperson for the Chicago-based drug store chain, the company is leasing back the building and "there are no current plans to close this location." One of Orion’s specialties is lease/buybacks.

Movie magic: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema is opening April 29. The Austin, Texas, movie theater with a lounge and miniature golf course in the lobby is in Mercato in Naples. The theater is in the space previously occupied by Silver Cinema, which closed in July. The new 33,652-square-foot movie house will have 11 auditoriums with about 650 reclining leather seats and 4K digital projection. Its food will be from a scratch-made menu. And while food and drinks are brought to a patron’s seat during a movie, the wait staff is trained to not disrupt the movie experience. This will be Alamo’s 40th theater and its first in Florida movie theater.

Tampa/St. Petersburg/Pasco/Polk

Photo by Mark Wemple

A good quarter: Eshenbaugh Land Co. is off to a pretty good start in 2024. The Tampa-based commercial real estate firm with a focus on land deals hit $90 million in sales volume for the first quarter of the year, with 17 deals averaging $5 million per transaction. That includes the sale of 114 acres in Pasco County to Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital earlier this year for $24 million. Also in Pasco, there was a $13.25 million sale to Pulte and a $7.76 million sale on State Road 52 to Lennar. Eshenbaugh was founded in 1992 by Bill Eshenbaugh and sold to Ryan Sampson in 2015. In 2022, the company surpassed $2 billion in total sales volume. Eshenbaugh, who’s known as the Dirt Dog, is still with the firm.

Industrial Tampa: Construction on a new industrial building in Tampa is set to start next month. The 100,620-square-foot building will be near Tampa International Airport at 6101 Johns Road. Stonemont Financial Group, the Atlanta based real estate investment firm behind the project, says it will have 32-foot clear height, spec office suites and the ability to be divided into 33,000 square feet of space for smaller tenants. Construction is expected to be completed early next year. A spokesperson for the firm says “Stonemont does not want to disclose any costs associated with the project.” The firm is no stranger to the area. Stonemont, which specializes in the industrial sector, recently completed the Sunlake Business Center, a two-building, 361,000-square-feet office park in Tampa and is nearly done with a four-building, 905,440-square-foot industrial facility in Lakeland.

Sarasota/Manatee

Retail roundabout: Apricot Lane Boutique, a well-known St. Armands Circle women’s fashion retailer, is for sale. SVN Commercial Advisory Group in Sarasota has listed the 1,768-square-foot retail property at 464 John Ringling Blvd. for $2.35 million. The listing says the sale will include both the building and the business. A separate listing on the website BizBuySell, which focuses on the marketing businesses, calls it “an especially rare opportunity to own your own income earning property.” The reason given for the sale: retirement. Gross annual revenue at Apricot Lane Boutique is $549,547, according to that listing. As for the building, which is just off the Circle, it was built in 1949 and completely renovated in 2016. A new roof was installed in 2022, the listing states. Apricot Lane is a franchised chain with six other locations in the state, including one in Fort Myers.

Courtesy image

Saving North Port: Sarasota County has bought 43.4 acres of land for conservation. The property is in North Port on Woodland Boulevard and within the county’s Environmentally Sensitive Lands Protection Program Deer Prairie Creek Preserve. It sold for $1.45 million. In a statement, the county says the land is made up of pastures, marshes and mixed hardwood hammock habitat. Eastern wild turkeys, crested caracara, swallow-tailed kite and sandhill cranes have been spotted on it. The Environmentally Sensitive Lands Protection Program is voter-approved and taxpayer-funded. Its mission is to buy and protect natural lands and parklands. Since voters gave it the green light in 1999, the program has protected and preserved more than 40,540 acres of natural habitat, with more than 21,000 of those acres placed under a conservation easement, the county says.

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