As North Florida Housing Market Cools, Investors Look to Commercial Properties
A sluggish North Florida housing market has two real estate execs heading toward commercial development. And they’re using lessons from the banking industry to anticipate their next move.
Harry Trevett and Jay Mock head Trevett-Mock Inc., a real estate investment company. Some of its developments include Marsh Lakes in Fernandina Beach and Villages of Valencia in St. Johns County.
Trevett-Mock’s portfolio mix flip-flopped about two years ago:
Whereas three-quarters of the company’s business was in residential Florida real estate then, business now is 75 percent commercial development, which includes shopping centers, offices and banks.
Trevett and Mock also have a hand in community banking, and led a group of investors that bought the First Bank of Jacksonville in 2004.
The heavy regulation that comes with banking has shed serious light on upcoming changes in the Florida mortgage market.
“We’re market-driven guys,” Mock said. “We go where the market takes us.”
Trevett and Mock have grown First Bank of Jacksonville from one Mandarin spot with $22.3 million in assets to two locations (the second is in Baymeadows) with $104.3 million in assets, according to its 2006 year-end report to the FDIC.
Two more bank locations are awaiting regulatory approval, one in Lakewood near the intersection of University and San Jose boulevards and the other in Trevett-Mock’s Village Shoppes at San Pablo.
Trevett and Mock were founding members of the First National Bank of Nassau County. But although banking is an investment, real estate development is their bread-and-butter income, Mock says.
Mock, who got his start as a Florida mortgage broker, said he switched to land development because it was more lucrative than selling homes.
“Instead of doing it for people for a fee, I started doing it for myself,” said Mock, who graduated from Fernandina Beach High School in 1986.
The company’s most anticipated commercial real estate project is a 108,000-square-foot addition to Amelia Station, a shopping center in the heart of Yulee. For years, the 13-acre property has been piles of dirt.
As development of surrounding property has picked up - a new golf community and Target and Home Depot shopping centers are all nearby - Trevett and Mock hope to break ground before the end of the year.
Mock says interest is high among tenants and envisions bistros, cafes and other neighborhood retailers to fill the mixed-use “village” center.
SOURCE: Florida Times-Union
