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Posted on Aug 26, 2021, 12:47pm CDT
St. Louis commercial real estate firm Sansone Group has bought more land and launched a second phase of construction in an industrial park at a prime location in Florida that serves as a tribute to the company’s founder, Anthony Sansone Sr., who died last year.
The Clayton-based company is in the second phase of developing 5.5 million square feet of warehouse space in an industrial park along Interstate 95 and southwest Becker Road in Port St. Lucie, Florida, called Tradition Center for Commerce. The St. Louis firm now owns 425 acres in the 1,200-acre park, with the Sansone section called Legacy Park at Tradition in honor of the late Sansone patriarch.
After previously buying 375 acres for the planned development, including 22 acres with Creve Coeur-based Argos Capital Partners, Sansone Group closed in July on another 40.9 acres to launch the project’s second phase, two speculative warehouses measuring 520,000 and 168,000 square feet that are slated to be completed in spring 2022. The spec warehouses are a collaboration with NorthBridge Partners, an investment firm in Boston with a portfolio focused on last-mile facilities for e-commerce. Alex Pappasand Sansone Group’s Peter Crane were the brokers involved in the land transaction, and Robert Smith and Kirk Nelson with CBRE are the listing brokers.
The first phase of Sansone’s development, a 245,000-square-foot sorting facility for FedEx, is nearing the end of construction. The building is projected to be finished by Oct. 21.
Sansone did not share investment costs or financing details of either phase.
The warehouses in Port St. Lucie have a prime location between central and south Florida — 120 miles south of Orlando and 115 miles north of Miami, with 70% of the state’s population, or 20 million people, within a three-hour drive. The Sansone park is directly off Interstate 95 and near the Florida Turnpike. Large prime distribution space in Miami or Palm Beach County is much harder to find these days, if it’s available at all, Principal Nick Sansone told the Business Journal.
“It’s a location that we really like that can touch almost the entire state,” Sansone said. “We believe it’s the next distribution hub for south Florida.”
The site is 30 minutes north of Palm Beach County, where the late Sansone patriarch lived with his wife, Mary Anne, and died of natural causes in April 2020 at age 93. Today, the company is run by four of Sansone Sr.’s eight children: Jim, Tim, Nick and Doug.
Before the family patriarch died on a Monday, he visited the vacant land in Port St. Lucie the previous Friday and sent a photo of himself looking out at the future industrial site to his sons.
“The last conversation I had with him was about this deal, and he loved it,” Nick Sansone said. “He loved the area, he loved the land, the vast land that we had there. He literally talked about that site up until Monday of his passing. And so we decided to name it after our father, and the city rallied around it. It makes it extra special for us, because our culture here is really built around carrying on the legacy of our father, our friend, our founder of the company.”
The “Legacy Park” name honors the senior Sansone’s legacy along with the new name of a road running off Becker Road into the development: Anthony Sansone Sr. Boulevard.
