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Life might get easier soon for business and industrial site selectors as well as real estate pros in search of development-ready locations in Tampa Bay.
The newly launched web-based “Competitive Sites” property inventory website is designed to remove a lot of the guesswork in evaluating buildings and raw land for office and industrial development. The website, from Hillsborough County and the Tampa Hillsborough Economic Development Corp., took a while to develop, notes Eric Lindstrom with Hillsborough County, because it's more than a property listing service.
“The objective is to position the county for new jobs from new companies coming to town,” Lindstrom says. “We want to be proactive in our approach.”
The inventory will be continuously updated. It takes in available properties in unincorporated Hillsborough County and the municipalities of Temple Terrace and Plant City, and includes sites in port, campus, urban, suburban and rural locations. Buildings must be 100,000 square feet or larger and vacant land at least 12 acres.
Searchers at tampaedc.com/competitivesites get a report for each Competitive Site in a single PDF file.
Lindstrom expects a big selling point to be the Competitive Sites program's level of detail on each property. The data details size, land use, development entitlements, road and rail access, utilities availability, flood status and environmental factors.
If the property can be a potential problem for the buyer, that too will be detailed, Lindstrom says. “Some of these sites have problems,” he says, “some big, some small.”
The idea, he says, is to create buyers informed sufficiently to react timely. “The more information they have, the more quickly they can make decisions,” he adds.
He says the website is developed mostly from a buyer's perspective. Says Lindstrom: “We wanted to put ourselves in the position of a company.”
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