Guy Paparella chose a 36-acre site along Lee Boulevard, near the Fort Myers–Lehigh Acres line, as the location for his latest development project. The shopping center called Stonewood will feature restaurants, a bank, retail stores and other services.

Lehigh Acres, now with almost 140,000 residents, has been growing in population but not as fast in commercial real estate development.

Enter Paparella, who began purchasing the property at 5600 Lee Blvd. in April 2024 with plans to develop projects he said will better serve the community.

So far, there are three confirmed tenants. A Suncoast Credit Union bank will be on the western end of the site, flanked to the east by a new Culver’s restaurant. A 20,000 square-foot Goodwill store will be built closer to the eastern end of the site.

Paparella enlisted Trinity Commercial Group to work on filling the leases. There are 14 developable lots. Some of those could be consolidated to account for a future grocery store, said Ty Hensley, senior advisor with TCG.

“It’s just shuffling through and making sure we’re carrying the right tenant mix, to bring just the right services and the right value to the community,” Hensley said. “An underserved community that just needs more retail businesses here.

“With Guy at the helm, we’re trying to be more intentional on who we’re bringing, which allows us to be more patient for the right user.”

A national coffee chain, a sit-down restaurant and perhaps a second quick-serve restaurant also could be in the works along with a national dental care chain, Hensley said.

“Some of the people in the area in the neighborhood here have expressed to us a desire to have a sit-down restaurant somewhere here in Lehigh, so that’s what we’re trying to attract,” Paparella said.

Paparella enlisted Quattrone & Associates to plan the site and do the engineering, which includes building three access roads. Thoroughbred Drive will rim the northern edge of the shopping center. Anselm Way will be a short road running north-south, with a traffic signal at Lee Boulevard and will connect to Thoroughbred Drive. Hialeah Avenue also will run north-south on the eastern end of the shopping center.

“We were fortunate we didn’t have any protected species. It was a previously disturbed site,” said Al Quattrone, president of Quattrone & Associates. “So, it made it ideal for development.

“Some of our challenges were our sewer is probably about a half a mile north on Buckingham Road, so we had to do a directional drill, which is drilling the force main underneath the FPL easement to get to that Buckingham Road sewer.”

The access roads and site work should be completed by the end of November, Quattrone said, following two years of planning and execution.

“Fortunately, and unfortunately, the design and permitting does typically take longer than the actual construction,” he said. “So, we have to get permits from various agencies. It’s a big collective effort.

“This one’s nice, because as I mentioned, we’re creating 14 developable lots, so we have to think how each lot’s going to be laid out to accommodate future users, whether it’s a grocery store or a fast-food user.”

Two retention ponds are being built to handle future water runoff, and Quattrone explained why.

“They want to make sure the post-development runoff — the amount of water that comes off the site — is consistent with predevelopment, so we don’t cause any harm to any of the neighbors, having more water leaving the site than we did before the property was even developed,” Quattrone said. “So, we do calculations to model that and we have drainage areas to offset those differences.”

The Stonewood project shows how far Paparella has come from when he began his career leasing construction equipment in the mid-1980s.

“In 1984, I started my own business with a partner of mine,” Paparella said. “It was called Florida Contractor Rentals. FCR for short. We rented construction equipment. We had a successful business. We opened up a store in Port Charlotte, and we opened up one in Naples. In 1989, we sold it to a British company.

“I worked for them for a couple of years. I ended up buying the company back. I promised myself I’d never sell my business again.”

In 1997, Paparella broke his own promise, selling his company to U.S. Rentals, so he could focus on other projects, including supplying construction equipment for shipbuilding in the Bahamas.

“It fixed all the cruise ships for Carnival Cruise Lines and Royal Caribbean,” Paparella said. “It was a 24-hour operation. We ran a crew for three, eight-hour shifts. We worked seven days a week. The only day shut down at the shipyard was Christmas.”

Paparella sold that company in 2023, which was about when he began looking at the shopping center project.

Paparella’s Lee Blvd. Investments LLC bought the western third of the land in 2024 for $3.2 million.

Next, Paparella’s Lee Blvd 36 LLC paid $1.4 million for the eastern third of the land in January of this year, property records show.

Finally, Paparella’s Ace Hardware Lee Blvd LLC paid $2.6 million for the middle third of the land in May of this year, completing the property assemblage. Paparella is landlord for an Ace Hardware store in south Fort Myers, which was how he had that LLC name. But he said he would look at bringing in an Ace Hardware store for the new shopping center.

City of Fort Myers owned all three parcels and had them appraised at a combined $3.1 million in 2016, the appraisal provided by the city showed. The city used the same firm, Fort Myers-based Carlson, Norris and Associates, to value the land again in 2022, when it came in at $7.3 million.

Paparella’s combined costs to purchase the land came in at just under that figure, $7.2 million.

Paparella had been interested in the property for years, but another company had been leasing the land since 2004 with plans to purchase it from the city. When that deal fell through, the company sued the city in 2022. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2023, clearing the way for Paparella’s companies to acquire the land.

“It’s a great site,” Paparella said. “We have a half a mile of frontage off Lee Boulevard. And I think this part of Lehigh, it does need some new commercial.