- March 28, 2024
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WINTER GARDEN Dan Roberts, Great Southern Realty certified property manager, has been considering a business park project on Daniels Road for more than a decade.
“There’s been a couple different iterations on the property since 2002,” he said of a plat between Burger King and West Orange Church of Christ. “We submitted a plan back then, and then obviously when the market kind of crashed, we pulled back our application and did not pursue it.”
But now is a much better time in a recovering market to resume the pursuit of this project, which the Winter Garden City Commission had approved in one of its iterations in summer 2007.
“Right now, we’re moving forward with the plan, and we hope to get it approved sometime in March by the city,” Roberts said. “If that happens, we’d probably be under construction sometime in late summer, early fall.”
The current plans call for the construction of approximately 26,000 square feet of retail space in the front and about 32,000 square feet of professional office space in the rear, he said.
“They’ll probably average between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet per tenant,” Roberts said.
Medical professionals in particular have shown interest in this area because Florida Hospital Winter Garden is scheduled to open in February, just two miles south off Daniels Road on Sembler Way.
“The drivers now are that the market is stronger, there’s more … houses, and there’s a greater interest in retail, and then the hospital has been a big driver for our medical professional,” Roberts said. “That’s been a primary driver for us.”
If all proceeds affirmatively, a tentative opening date would be in the late spring or early summer of 2017, he said. That would include a permit to clear the land.
“We have a preliminary approval to clear a portion of it, but we’re not going to move forward until we get the rest of the site approved,” Roberts said. “Our application is in to the St. Johns River Water Management District for a mass grading permit, so as we get that, then we’ll probably move forward there.”
Some of those interested potential tenants have contacted Roberts about the space, but it is too soon to announce anything, he said.
“It’s kind of premature for us,” Roberts said. “We think those schedules are pretty realistic right now, but I can’t say for sure.”
Contact Zak Kerr at [email protected].