Former Borders entices new tenant

The folks at Florida Medical Clinic, a multi-specialty medical firm with 36 locations in the Tampa area, have a thing for books.

The firm, with 33 medical specialties and more than 215 providers, recently acquired its second former Borders bookstore, for continued expansion. The latest acquisition was the Brandon Borders, a 22,585-square-foot space on Town Center Boulevard. Florida Medical paid $2.05 million for the building, states a release from commercial real estate firm CBRE, which helped arrange the sale. The purchase follows Florida Medical Clinic's 2012 acquisition of the former Borders Carrollwood store. The firm paid $3.85 million for that space, a 30,000-square-foot building on Dale Mabry Highway.

A national mega-bookstore, Borders filed for bankruptcy in February 2011. The firm began to liquidate stores nationwide in the months after the Chapter 11 filing. That included eight stores on the Gulf Coast, from the Brandon location to one in Fort Myers and another in Naples. The closures put nearly 200,000 square feet of commercial real estate space back on the market, and in many cases the stores remain empty toady. The former Sarasota Borders, for instance, on a high-traffic intersection, Bee Ridge Road and U.S. 41, is one of the vacant properties.