A new Amazon sorting facility off Alico Road, just west of Interstate 75, will become operational Monday, Nov. 15.
This will be Amazon’s first “sort center” in Southwest Florida, Owen Torres, a spokesperson for Amazon, confirmed in an email. It will create more than 200 full- and part-time jobs. Employees will help sort and ship customer orders.
Amazon also will hire new roles in operations management, human resources, facilities management and more, Torres said.
Amazon has been rapidly expanding in Southwest Florida. The company started delivering packages in early June from its new 104,860-square-foot last-mile delivery station on the corner of Davis and Collier boulevards in East Naples.
Prospective employees can find more information at amazon.com/apply. The address of the sort center, for now, shows up on Lee County property records as 8250 Logistics Drive.
Sort centers are a critical part of the “middle mile” of a package’s journey, Torres said. It’s the in-between period of transporting packages between Amazon sites before the last-mile delivery for customers. Packages are shipped to sort centers from Amazon air hubs, gateways and fulfillment centers.
There, the packages are sorted by zip code before being transported to delivery stations or last-mile delivery partners for customer deliver, Torres said.
The building measures about 270,000 square feet. It’s owned by Seefried Industrial, an Atlanta-based development company that has a history of collaborating with Amazon.
The sort center going operational half-culminates a series of four land deals from over the past two years.
Adjacent to the sort center, Seefried has a separate, 180,000-square-foot industrial building under construction. That will become a delivery station for Amazon to be completed next year.
The corridor continues to boom in construction and in land deals.
In December 2020, Stag Industrial LLC paid $27.7 million for a nearby industrial building off Domestic Avenue.
In June, Stonemont Financial, another Georgia-based investment company, paid $39.3 million for Gulfcoast Industrial Campus. That 300,000-square-foot warehouse/industrial building was developed by Harvey Youngquist. It is leased by multi-tenants and has nothing to do with the Amazon projects, said Gary Tasman, CEO of Cushman & Wakefield.
But those two deals, and the ones LSI Companies president Justin Thibaut brokered for the Amazon project, exemplify how the value of industrial properties in the Alico Road corridor have skyrocketed over the past decade.
Consider: Alico Family Golf bought what became a 30-acre driving range for $1.25 million in 2013. It sold it in June 2020 for $9 million.
“Think back to 2013, first off,” Thibaut said. “In 2013, when that group purchased the property for a golf facility, there was very little in the Alico Road corridor. There were some things here and there, but nothing ike it was here today.
“The owners had some foresight. The market came to them as Lee County developed as a whole and our population grew. They were sitting in a location that can’t be replicated. Very central in Lee County. Very close to I-75 and the airport. What made the deal so attractive, is the entitlement and the zoning were already in place. A lot of that had to do with the foresight of these groups. Alico Golf, they were very smart.”
Four real estate transactions by Seefried on behalf of Amazon created the massive complex that’s more than half-finished.
Thibaut helped broker three of them:
Wayside Industrial sold 14.9 acres for $6.1 million in May.
Wayside Industrial sold 47 acres for $12.9 million in April.
Alico Family Golf sold 30 acres for $9 million in June.
Joel Waltzer sold 11.35 acres for $2.2 million in April, a deal that did not involve Thibaut.
“Show me another 100 acres, continuous, with zoning, in that area that can be purchased,” Thibaut said of why the prices on that land escalated. “That’s part of it. It’s supply and demand. In that location, the property. We had a lot of suitors for that property.”
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