Boca Raton-based Investments Limited is asking $8.2 million or $50.23 per sf on the Plaza Center, a 163,257-sf retail center on 13 acres at the southeast corner of the intersection. It is asking $6.25 million or $55.70 per sf for a 112,200-sf retail site known as Westgate Center on the northwest corner of the intersection.

"We're testing the waters," Bradley Steinbach, an Investment Limited spokesman, tells GlobeSt.com. "We're also seriously thinking about redeveloping (both properties)."

The decision to market the properties comes as the state has made significant progress on a $11-million plan to widen and improve State Road 7 to six lanes from four lanes through the intersection.

It also comes as local elected officials renewed a nearly 12-year initiative to revitalize a one-mile radius around the intersection. City officials created a Community Redevelopment Agency in February 2000 and then published a 67-page Community Redevelopment Plan last April.

"Anything that improves the general character of the properties overall in this area is helpful," Steinbach says. "The area has not been really charging forward economically the way other areas have been."

To some market observers, however, the hope of creating higher property values depends on more than just creating new local bureaucracies or creating new traffic lanes peppered with landscaping and street lighting. Market demographics don't enhance the value of the commercial properties in that section of the city, Chris Metzger, a senior director in the Fort Lauderdale office of Cushman & Wakefield of Florida Inc., tells GlobeSt.com. Even the redevelopment plan acknowledged the one-mile radius around the intersection has one of the lowest ratios of income per capita in the entire city.

The redevelopment study also found "a substantial number of deteriorated or deteriorating structures; a predominance of defective or inadequate street layout, faulty lot layout in relation to size adequacy, accessibility or usefulness; unsanitary or unsafe conditions;" and "inadequate open space; vacancies in retail, office and other space and unmet potential in sales and property tax revenue."

The concern of Metzger and others is whether state and local investment in that redevelopment area is nothing more than façade renewal. Efforts to reach Mayor Rae Carole Armstrong about the redevelopment plan were unsuccessful.

"What is the goal" of the redevelopment plan? Metzger asks. "The area does not have redeeming features. And the city needs to have a firm understanding of what the goal is and whether it is realistic."

Instant Insights /

Owner Testing Sales Market with Two Retail Properties at Rundown Intersection

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