GlobeSt.com SPECIAL REPORT: Low-Rise Industrial Structures Rocked By Charley

Along Tamiami Trail (State Road 41), between Sarasota in Sarasota County and Punta Gorda in Charlotte County, single-story, steel-clad industrial structures suffered the most severe damage, area brokers assessing the storm's aftermath tell GlobeSt.com.

Preliminary estimates by insurance carries of the residential, commercial and industrial property damage in the entire state is $20 billion but there won't be a damage breakdown by county or submarket for several weeks, brokers tell GlobeSt.com.

Doron Valero, president and chief operating officer of Equity One Inc., the North Miami Beach-based shopping center developer, reports about $250,000 in total damage to roofs, air-conditioner units, landscaping and signage at all of its Florida properties.

Christopher Leonard, an office and industrial specialist in the Clearwater office of Colliers Arnold Real Estate Services Co., tells GlobeSt.com he and his damage assessment team toured the hardest hurricane-hit market from Boca Grande to Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda and were "surprised" that most of the structural damage they saw involved steel industrial buildings.

"It appeared that once the air got into those buildings, the steel walls and braces apparently began buckling from the force of the winds," Leonard tells GlobeSt.com. Auto repair shop buildings, single-story office buildings and street-level strip retail centers appeared to be hardest hit, Leonard says. But he saw "little or no damage" to most glass-clad office buildings of four stories or more in height.

"We would have thought the low-to-the-ground, single-story, concrete-block industrial, office and retail buildings might have survived best, but it didn't look that way to us," Leonard says. Fallen trees smashed numerous small business structures, the broker says.

In metro Tampa, Kimberley Kaiser, director of Research for Colliers Arnold, says "all we got was a lot of heavy rain and winds but no major damage at all" to office, industrial and retail properties. The Jacksonville office, industrial and retail submarkets reported no serious damage.

Likewise, in Miami and the rest of South Florida, Toni Splichal, a marketing consultant representing several major commercial real estate brokerages, tells GlobeSt.com she has heard "no reports of any major damage" in Dade, Broward or Palm Beach counties.

Calum Weaver, a marketing coordinator in the Miami office of CB Richard Ellis Inc., tells GlobeSt.com his company's brokers are reporting "no serious damage" at any of the properties they manage for third-party owners throughout the state, even in direct-hit areas of Lee, Charlotte and Sarasota counties.

In metro Orlando, one of the hardest hit hubs on Charley's northbound route, brokers Monday were investigating their managed properties, mostly to recover damaged signage. "Those signs cost anywhere between $300 and $500 each, so the lost of several at multiple properties can start to add up quickly," Dean Fritchen, a senior broker in the Winter Park office of Coldwell Banker Commercial NRT, tells GlobeSt.com.

Fritchen says several Polk County industrial and office buildings, 60 miles south of Downtown Orlando, suffered "serious structural damage" but a damage total was still being assessed.

Telephone lines Monday were still down in most Downtown Orlando residential neighborhoods but phones were ringing and cell phones were working at most office properties, Bert Locke Jr., a senior real estate manager at CB Richard Ellis Inc. and co-chair of Orlando BOMA's government affairs committee, tells GlobeSt.com.

"[There's] lots of broken windows and loss of power at Maitland Center office buildings but no serious structural damage," says Locke. Maitland Center, a five-million-sf class A office submarket, eight miles north of Downtown Orlando, includes 49 buildings.