Naples medical device giant builds apartments to meet employee growth

Arthrex, the $3 billion Naples company with an international reputation for developing cutting-edge surgical tools, has turned its attention to a new project.

The company is building an apartment complex.

No, Arthrex is not getting into the commercial real estate business nor is it moving into multifamily development. What the company is doing is creating a corporate housing community to help new employees transition as they move into Southwest Florida.

“In many cases, they’re going to work here full time,” says Trent Lewis, Arthrex’s senior director of facilities and corporate infrastructure.

“How do you get these families to come in? And how do you keep them comfortable so that they can make this big decision for a career change to move their lives, and sometimes their families, to Southwest Florida?”

One way to do that is the 41-unit complex currently under construction in Naples’ Palm River community. The project is on a 2.06-acre parcel less than two miles from Arthrex’s global headquarters.

The company bought the property at 208 Palm River Blvd. in 2023. At the time, there were three, four-unit condominium buildings on the site. Those existing structures, Athrex said when the project was announced, were built in 1989 and “would require cost-prohibitive renovations to bring them up to code” and to meet quality expectations.

The decision was then made to design and build a new five-story, 80,000-square-foot building.

The site, which sits between the front and back nine holes of a golf course, originally was expected to accommodate only 33 units, Lewis says, but rezoning allowed the company to increase that to the 41. Given the tight space, and the need to maximize the number of units, it is being built with ground floor parking.

Each unit will have two bedrooms and two bathrooms and will be 1,100 square feet. 

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“This is wrapping up very nicely and should be complete in the next couple of months,” says Lewis, speaking at the Real Estate Investment Society’s monthly luncheon in Fort Myers Aug. 11.

Lewis did not discuss how much was being spent to develop the community and an Arthrex spokesperson says in an email that the company is “unable to share any information about cost of the project.”

Collier County property records show the property in the Palm River community was bought in 2023 for $5.75 million by a company named Krisdan Management Inc. According to the state’s Division of Corporations’ database, Krisdan’s chairman and president is Reinhold D. Schmieding, Arthrex’s founder and CEO.

Lewis says the need to build the community is based on the Arthrex’s growing workforce.

He told the commercial real estate group that the company has surpassed 13,000 employees worldwide and that it has about 600 open jobs posted at any one time. New hire orientation classes are held every two weeks and bring in between 40 and 50 people.

To address that growth, “one solution we came up with was to start dabbling in a little bit of corporate housing and this goes back to before my time (started) in 2012.”

Today, he says, the company has access to about 60 properties ranging from single-family homes to two- and three-bedroom apartments in complexes.

“We continue to grow this program, and we continue to grow the company, and that kind of brings us full circle now,” Lewis says, adding that “we’re currently running at about 94% occupancy on corporate housing for the last year.”

Arthrex was founded in Munich, Germany in 1981 and moved it to Naples about a decade later.

According to its website, the company develops more than 1,000 new products and related procedures annually “to advance minimally invasive orthopedic, trauma, spine, cardiothoracic, orthobiologic, and arthroplasty innovations worldwide.” It also specializes in 4K surgical visualization and OR integration technology solutions.

The Naples campus is home to Arthrex’s corporate and manufacturing operations, as well as a medical education center, conference center and a hotel.

The private company has estimated revenues of $3.2 billion, according to a Forbes profile of Schmieding who, the magazine says, owns an estimated 95% of Arthrex.

His personal net worth, as of Aug. 24, is $5.4 billion, the magazine reports.