Interest in vacant freestanding bank buildings is accruing, with medical/dental/professional users leading the transformative charge. As bank users transition to an online environment, backfilling their physical space is in high demand. End users prefer to reimagine existing, improved properties over ground-up development.
The impact of Florida’s in-migration, coupled with Sunshine State taxes and growing consumer demands, make second generation inventory second-to-none in commercial real estate. The ability to exercise commercial support to the growing local population has become more challenging.
Re-use developments (particularly those in dense, in-fill areas) save time and money by circumventing preliminary infrastructural assessments – water quality, retention / runoff requirements, traffic studies, access, etc.
Depending on lot size (and grade), improvements can range from $300,000 to $500,000 per acre, excluding landfill cost. One must also consider the downtime and expense associated with Engineers, Architects, and Municipal / State / Federal approvals. Then there’s increased water requirements, as well as adapting development criteria in the aftermath of recent hurricanes and tropical storms. All these essentials add to the total cost, time, and uncertainty of the new build process.
Florida’s rapid growth has created residential gentrification that favors less travel and more convenience stops. With this as an axiom, former bank buildings are a top asset for commercial portfolios. This, however, is a limited focus. Other acquisitional and construction considerations are assets:
• With excess parking / land.
• In low-yield locations.
• Have obsolete designs.
As a former planning board member, it’s evident the current phases of (1) conceiving a design, (2) attaining permits, and (3) constructing new commercial product is inarguably more tedious and expensive than renovating an existing property.
Search available cost-saving acquisitions at https://bit.ly/Paul-Rutledge-LQ.
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Paul Rutledge, Senior Broker Associate at LQ Commercial in Tampa, Fla. specializes in land sales (from 1 – 60 acres) and in restructuring commercial assets. His experience includes the redevelopment and lease up of the $20M “City Centre” mall in Winter Haven, and the $100M “Pompano Citi Centre” open-air mall in South Florida.
Consultative accomplishments include an array of repositioned assets like the “DeSoto Square Mall” (now a mixed-use destination) to a 50% screen reduction of high-end, multi-plex cinemas from Pasco to Manatee County; two premier (business-friendly) redevelopment submarkets in the Greater Tampa Bay region.
Contact Paul’s Commercial Brokerage team for redevelopment pricing – or opinion of values – across Florida.
