Significant new office and retail in Southeast's prime business location

One of the Southeast's prime business locations, Tampa's Westshore district, after a consolidation during the first half of the decade and rumblings of new activity during the past two years, is embarking on projects that will change the landscape and add hundreds of workers to the 73,000-plus already employed in the district.

Projects under way and about to begin will enhance the area's upscale retail appeal, too, with West Shore Plaza's new anchor, Saks Fifth Avenue, due to open Friday, November 13, and International Plaza (which may be renamed) set to become a high-end competitor just eight-tenths of a mile away at West Shore Boulevard and Boy Scout Boulevard.

Tampa International Airport Director Louis Miller is managing a $21-million terminal upgrade. Photo by Steven P. Widoff

Just east of North Dale Mabry Highway, the new Buccaneer's stadium is nearing completion, and apartment complexes are rising at Rocky Point. There's considerable activity at the edges of the district the common boundaries of which were defined 15 years ago by its marketing and development agency, the Westshore Alliance, to include all the territory from Tampa Bay east to Himes Avenue and from Kennedy Boulevard north to Hillsborough Avenue but the most noticeable changes are about to take place at Westshore's center, just south of Tampa International Airport.

On the northwest corner of West Shore Boulevard and Spruce Street, Crescent Resources Inc. of Charlotte, (real estate subsidiary of Duke Power Corp.) will build 400,000 square feet of speculative Class A office space in two six-story precast-concrete-and-glass buildings. Joe Taggart, Crescent Resources' vice president for development, notes "there hasn't been a building built in Westshore since 1988, at least one with a large floorplate and a high parking ratio."

Plans call for five parking spaces for every 1,000 square feet of office space, Taggart says, with the first floor partly underground to keep a low 2 1/2-story profile for what is in fact a four-story building. Taggart says everything should be ready for occupancy by August 1999.

Across West Shore Boulevard, north of Boy Scout Boulevard, Hall of Fame Golf Course will disappear when Taubman Centers Inc. begins a 1.1-million-square-foot, upper-end regional mall called International Plaza, due to open in fall of 2001, says Chris Tennyson, senior vice president of the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., developer. Tennyson says the project is not affected by the recent Taubman Centers Inc. alliance with Mills Corp of Arlington, Va., to develop Mills-style megamalls (usually stocked with moderate - and lower-priced stores). Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom's are the two upscale department store anchors announced at this writing as having signed letters-of-intent.

"We're working with other department stores to complete the anchor lineup," Tennyson says, noting that the design calls for four or five anchors, with space for about 150 other specialty stores among them. "Our goal would be to have retail components unique to the market we're looking for 40 percent of our stores to fall into that category."

Tennyson says Taubman's core business is developing high-end malls like the company's mall at Short Hills, New Jersey, The Falls in Miami, and a Florida project due in 2001, Wellington Green in West Palm Beach.

Westshore market shortly after Westshore Plaza opened in late 1967. Photo courtesy of the Austin Companies

While plans are still evolving, Tennyson says Taubman will spend "a lot of time working toward a goal of making this mall accessible to passengers at the airport, both domestic and international travelers." Whether that means buses or trams plying to and from the passenger terminals or something more clever, "we think we can capture that market for the Tampa economy." He adds, that Taubman officials, used to Detroit's airport, "are excited about having the No. 1-rated airport nearby."

That's not all that's nearby. Tennyson is already used to answering the obvious question: What about West Shore Plaza?

"We still see a need for the kind of mall we're building, and we can co-exist. We believe there's plenty of room to satisfy our niche in Tampa. You know, the Tampa area has been on the radar screen with national retailers for some time. That interest was delayed by the credit crunch in the early 90s, but the area has lots of density, lots of wealth. The stores we're talking about are pretty conservative, pretty careful before they make a move. And, wherever we go and build a mall, the malls around us get better."

That's not quite the way West Shore Plaza's marketing director, Debra Kent Faulk, sees it. While "we welcome the competition, this could get a little too close. We love seeing Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom"s, but other malls in the area could absorb those retailers. What we really question is whether the market will be fragmented by adding all that small-store space."

West Shore Plaza's owners since 1990, American Freeholds, a partnership organized by Washington, D.C.-based Grosvenor International (Atlantic Ltd.), didn't wait for competition before upgrading the 31-year-old mall. Faulk credits a $10-million floor-to-ceiling renovation in 1993, creating skylights and a kind of Mediterranean ambience, as a factor in landing FAO Schwarz and Saks Fifth Avenue, which will open its new 100,000-square-foot store in November.

"Shopping centers either get better or they get worse," Faulk says. "They do not stay the same." To that end, West Shore Plaza is undergoing a $170-million renovation, the first phase of which, a covered 670-space parking deck east of J.C. Penney, opened in November. The second phase is a second parking deck with 870 spaces, due to open with Saks. Phase III, to be complete in spring of 2000, will transform the mall. A new 600-seat food court will triple current capacity. There will be space for from two to four sit-down restaurants, a second-story 15-screen AMC cinema, built to the industry's latest specifications, Faulk says. Dillard's will expand eastward by 70,000 square feet, giving it a 224,000-square-foot retail space. A third parking deck will be added.

When it's finished, Faulk says, West Shore Plaza will be a 1.2-million square foot mall, and the addition of 100 live oaks, 1,050 palm trees and other landscaping will give the mall curb appeal such as it has never had. "The mall is constantly evolving," Faulk says. "When we opened, Woolworth's was center court. Now it's FAO Schwartz. Banana Republic starts construction on its space this summer. Tampa has become very hot among retailers, and that's a challenge for us because they're looking at the market here. We're not waiting to talk to new, prospective tenants."

"We have the residential base, the business district, and we're reaching out to tourists English, Germans, Brazilians, Argentinians so we're not dependent on just one customer segment. That's how it is with malls, anyway. You move forward or you die."

Count among potential new shoppers at both malls the 750 professionals in Westshore for 10 or 12 weeks of training by Price Waterhouse LLP at its $52-million, 23-acre campus being built west of Eisenhower Boulevard, north of Memorial Drive. Price Waterhouse's $1.4-billion global management consulting practice is designed to help clients maximize business performance by integrating technology, organizational change, and business processes.

Two six-story Class A office buildings are being built by Crescent Resources, Inc. just north of Spruce Street, west of West Shore Blvd.

A jewel in Westshore's crown, Price Waterhouse's Professional Development Center will include a four-story, 132,610-square-foot office building with 13 classrooms and other student and faculty areas; an 11-building, 360-unit (96 one- and 264 two-bedroom units) hotel to be called Suites at Mainsail Village; services such as a laundromat, cafe, lounge, grocery story; and recreational facilities Ð a gym, volleyball, basketball, and tennis courts, and a swimming pool.

All this will create more than 1,000 jobs over the next four years, the company says, including 200 full-time positions, 400 part-time instructors and 675 in construction. Price Waterhouse will "open a state-of-the-art global training center which will be one of the most technologically sophisticated training facilities in the professional services industry," says David Matthes, a principal of Carter & Associates-ONCOR International, the firm developing the office building.

Sandra Kinsey, managing director for Price Waterhouse and head of the professional development center, says the firm "has been holding its training activities in Hillsborough County over the past ten years," and the decision to build this high-tech campus in Tampa "underscores . . . our commitment to staying here." She says the company won't abandon its offices on West Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Some employees may be transferred to the new campus, but any free space will be occupied by other departments. Noting that Price Waterhouse had considered other sites nationally before choosing Tampa, Marsha Rydberg of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce's Committee of 100 estimated the economic impact of the expansion at "$6.3 million this year, and $42.2 million over the next four years."

Another project with major impact was announced in June. The Thayer Group of Tampa and Alliance Commercial Partners of Colorado said they intend a September start on the first of four six-story office buildings that will form an $80-million office park called WestPort. It will be built on a 20-acre site on the south side of Boy Scout Boulevard, between Lois and Manhattan avenues.

Not all Westshore construction is as grandiose. Birchwood Properties Corp. is finishing a two-story, 52,000-square-foot office/parking structure at 5524 West Cypress Street for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Birchwood's president, Chuck Prather, long active in Westshore real estate with Vector Realty and Paragon Group, says he's "excited about Westshore now. It's becoming extremely active."

One reason for the activity in Westshore is escalating lease rates. "Investment activity in the Westshore market continues to be exceptionally active," says Carter & Associates's David Matthes. "Buildings we bought on behalf of our clients at $50 per foot in the early 1990s are now being aggressively courted by the REITS at $95 to $100 per foot." He says his clients like that sort of appreciation.

Crescent Property's Taggart agrees with the Westshore consensus of the moment. "It has one of the lowest vacancy ratios since I've been doing business," he says, referring to a flurry of activity since Crescent announced its new office buildings at Spruce Street and West Shore Boulevard. "We'll be getting $22.50 per square foot on the leases. On Rocky Point they're getting about $24 right now."

Pat McGuire of the commercial real estate firm Ryon & Associates, which recently finished a $3-million renovation of the 216,226-square-foot Lincoln Center at 5401 West Kennedy Boulevard and in April sold it to Minnesota's St. Paul Properties for $21.5 million, says he still has 30,000 square feet to lease, but the space in the 23-year-old building can now be considered "high-end Class B," which is pushing the $18- to $20-per-square-foot range. McGuire agrees there is virtually no Class A space left in Westshore. "That's why there's a noticeable trend here to acquire Class B and C buildings and renovate them to meet the demand for space."