- May 13, 2026
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Wholesale retail giant and warehouse membership club Costco has paid $55 million for a 55-acre parcel in Fort Myers in a deal the local broker is calling “one of the largest and highest-value land sales” in the region’s history.
“When compared specifically against commercial development tracts exceeding 25 acres in Southwest Florida, we believe this transaction represents one of — if not the — highest land sales on a per-acre basis for a tract of this scale in the region,” Chase Mayhugh, president and CEO of Mayhugh Commercial Advisors, says in an email to the Business Observer.
The land is at the intersection of Colonial Boulevard and Plantation Road. The site gives Costco more than 1,100 feet of frontage on Colonial and more than 3,100 feet along Plantation, as well as about 700 feet on Metro Parkway.
Costco did not respond to a request for comment and Mayhugh is not sure when construction will start or when the store will open.
He did say not all approvals are in place and the final permit has not been issued, though it’s only a matter of time. “The buyer did get to a place where they felt comfortable to move forward with closing.”
Mayhugh, who along with his father Chuck represented the seller, says the firm worked with Costco for about 19 months in order to put the deal together.
He calls the company’s site selection process “extremely thorough” and says it looked at multiple sites in Fort Myers before landing on the 55-acre parcel.
The determining factor was the infrastructure. The property, Chuck Mayhugh says in a statement, “offered the roadway network, access and scale needed to support their long-term vision.
“It stood out clearly against competing sites.”
He says that the development will include multiple entry points and there is space for a fueling station. There is also the potential for signalized access and dedicated turn lanes.
Costco originally was looking for a smaller site — 25 acres to 30 acres — but the seller required the full 55-acre parcel to be sold together and had previously declined multiple offers from developers and retail strip centers.
The sellers are Cois Family Partners LLC and Carcione Family Partners LLC.
The Mayhughs says the deal establishes a new standard for land sales in Fort Myers.
In the email to the Business Observer, Chase Mayhugh says that based on CoStar Analytics, larger tracts exceeding 25 acres usually sell at lower per-acre prices compared to smaller sites. That is because of the economies of scale and development plans.
(The Costco site sold for about $1 million per acre or about $23 per square foot.)
He points to the Red Coconut RV Resort property on Fort Myers Beach an example.
Seagate Development Group bought the 10-acre property in 2023 for $52 million. Mayhugh says that translates to roughly $5.22 million per acre or approximately $119.98 per square foot.
While the numbers are higher, the Red Coconut deal involved a significantly smaller site meant for high-density vertical residential redevelopment, “which commands a different valuation profile than large-scale commercial land assemblages.”
Mayhugh doesn’t make a direct comparison to any commercial properties, but one may be the $620 million sale of 2,000 acres on Alico Road in Lee County to North Carolina-based Martin Marietta in late 2024. The sale, at the time, was touted as the largest in Lee County’s history.
The per acre sale price was $310,000.
The month following the Martin Marietta purchase, Amazon paid $66 million for 143 acres on State Road 82 in Fort Myers, paying about $461,500 per acre.
Those two, of course, were bought for larger projects and the economy of scale Mayhugh talks about may apply.
Whatever the price, the Mayhughs say in the statement that the Costco deal “represents more than a land sale, it signals continued institutional demand and long-term confidence in the Fort Myers market.”
“This is the type of project that reshapes a corridor,” Chase Mayhugh says.
“It brings sustained traffic, supports surrounding businesses and reinforces Southwest Florida as a target market for national retailers and institutional capital.”
Costco, for its part, currently operates 928 warehouse stores globally, including 637 in the United States. It has 34 in Florida, of those 10 are along the Gulf coast. The chain has two Lee County locations, including one, at 7171 Cypress Lake Drive, five miles south of the recently-purchased sirte.
Earlier this month, Costco reported April sales rose 13% from last year to $23.92 billion.
