A year ago, a pair of investors from New Jersey bought most of the southern chunk of the Market Square shopping center in south Fort Myers.
A year later, Schiff Enterprises closed on its missing piece, a 30,000-square-foot building leased by Barnes & Noble.
Robert and Abe Schiff just paid $7.5 million for the building to pair with the rest of the shopping center, 13751 Tamiami Trail S., off U.S. 41 just south of Daniels Parkway.
“It sold at full list price,” said Jim Shiebler of Marcus & Millichap, who represented the buyers. Chris Bosworth of CBRE in Atlanta represented the sellers, a different ownership group from the one that owned the adjacent piece that has a Dollar Tree, World Market, Petco and Michael’s the arts and crafts store.
“It’s a new, 10-year lease of a corporate, absolute, triple-net style formatted lease,” said Shiebler, meaning the tenant, not the owner, pays for insurance, taxes and upkeep of the property. “It’s at a trophy location, that’s truly irreplaceable land.”
About 100,000 vehicles per day pass by it, making it one of Lee County’s busiest intersections.
“It checks all the boxes as far as traffic count,” Shiebler said. “Wealth, growth, density. It’s highly coveted, and this is really the epicenter of Lee County.”
There were multiple suitors for the land, he said, and there were complexities the buyers already had learned about one year prior.
“Each one of these tenants requires that no competitor can be within a certain distance,” Shiebler said. “Now you’re getting into thousands of pages of documentation of each independent corporate lease. It’s very sophisticated. These gentlemen already had sifted through that, based on the original purchase.”
Shiebler said this helped him position the buyers to purchase it at asking price. Shiebler brokered the adjacent 70,000 square feet a year ago for $13.2 million.
“It’s tremendous value to them,” Shiebler said. “Much more value for these buyers than a random buyer. Because they have control, and they have fluidity of what they can ultimately do in the future. That could include expansion. It could include drive-thru. It also could include loading docks in the rear to increase the volume of deliveries.”
