? by Michele Newbern Gillis
Staff Writer
Walter O’Shea is a very unassuming man.
At 36, he has been very instrumental in bringing to fruition one of the most lucrative deals in North Florida, yet still feels that it was all a matter of timing.
“I think I was just in the right place at the right time,” said O’Shea, the project manger for Hines Development overseeing the construction of Palencia, the new community on U.S. 1 just north of St. Augustine.
“It was a good time for me to move to join Hines in the Southeast. The team there was relatively small there had been some changes in top management within the Southeast and we started aggressively pursuing development activities in Florida and really I was the first person in line for the first project that came up and it happened to be this one.
“It happened to be what has turned out to be a very successful project. I’m real pleased with how well Palencia is going and have been very proud to be a part of it. It has been an exciting ride.”
O’Shea said his local partnerships helped him to succeed.
“I’ve had the benefit of two great local partners to work with here in Hawley [Smith] and Paul [Fletcher],” he said. “They have made our entry into this market so easy and have really performed so much of the behind-the-scenes work to get the project going. When I came down here, I didn’t have a Hines team to work with, I was the Hines team and so they were really to a large degree my mentors here in this market place and with a product I had never worked on before. Without their guidance, there is no way we would be where we are right now.”
Smith and Fletcher are both partners in the development team and Hines is responsible for the day-to-day management of the project.
Palencia, with an anticipated 2,642 residential units, will lead the way for a myriad of commercial development in its town center and along U.S. 1. It will have 900,000 square feet of retail and office space and O’Shea is now directly responsible for overseeing that part of the project.
He said they have a mile of frontage on U.S. 1 which will have a grocery-anchored retail center and outparcels including restaurants, banks, fast food and daycare.
“Hopefully, we should have some sales announced this year,” said O’Shea.
His road to Palencia started seven years ago when he joined Hines seven years ago in Atlanta.
“I worked on a couple of projects that never came to fruition,” said O’Shea. “We did the pre-development work on two or three different projects and then started working on what was then called Marshall Creek [later renamed Palencia].”
That project brought him to Jacksonville where he commuted back and forth for about a year and a half through some of the initial feasibility studies, initial permitting and underwriting.
O’Shea said May of 1997 was when they really got started working on Palencia full-force.
“When we started working on the project, I was the only person here,” said O’Shea. “At that point we were doing financial models and financial analysis and then we were underwriting the market and doing a lot market research. Now, I have a staff of 50, so I am more of manager. Most of my time is spent managing other people.”
Palencia was a result of the vision of several people. First and foremost was Michael Harrison, the project officer.
“He and I were the first two people working on it back when we started,” said O’Shea. “We kind of worked on it side by side throughout. I don’t think it was one person’s vision, I think it was the vision of a team.”
Now that the project is coming out of the ground, literally, O’Shea thinks it is great to see his hard work pay off.
“We’re thrilled,” he said. “We are finally seeing the Village Center. For us, that was such an important part of the vision of the project. It will be where we will have art shows on Saturday afternoon and concerts on Friday evenings. It will really become the central meeting hub of the community as well. It is nice to see buyers responding to a lot of things that we thought would differentiate the project here in the market place.
“They are really agreeing with some of the research we did and saying ‘Well, trees are important, so do what you can to save trees.’ It’s a lot of work to do that and it’s a lot of work to find the right builders who will work with you to do that.”
O’Shea has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Cornell University.
After college, he worked as a construction superintendent with Turner Construction Company for six years. He joined Hines after earning his master’s in business administration from Northwestern University.
“Having had an engineering background, I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to take course work outside of the engineering field,” said O’Shea. “I took a couple business classes, but not that many so I really didn’t have any finance, marketing or accounting experience. I recognized that in order to open up some new doors, I really needed to go back to graduate school.”
He said he has construction in his blood since his father and both of his grandfathers worked in construction in New York. “They were both stone masons,” said O’Shea. “My dad was an engineer and worked in construction. I started working with a local builder building decks and tarring foundations when I was 14. So, I’ve actually been working in some form of construction since then.”
Most of O’Shea’s background is in commercial construction, but said he likes residential just fine.
“It is different,” he said. “In one way it is more gratifying because of all of the emotional energy involved. The fact that you will actually have homeowners who will live there and it is such an emotional decision for them. They get as excited about the project as you do. It is an interesting dynamic to see. You have buyers who get excited about buying the house, move in and become so enthused about the community. I think it is more rewarding than being involved a commercial project and it’s easy to go to one discipline to the other.”
The many years behind Palencia have finally paid off and O’Shea said the project is going very well. He explained the thought process of the placement of Palencia as it relates to the Jacksonville market.
“We looked very closely at the area,” said O’Shea. “We looked at what were the dynamics in the Jacksonville market.
“First of all, was there was a good economic stable base where we could rely on growth? And we said yes.
“Then, where was growth going to occur next? So, looking at where it has traditionally moved in Jacksonville, that meant kind of east and south of downtown. J. Turner Butler Boulevard was getting continually congested, Ponte Vedra Beach was nearing buildout.
“Looking at U.S. 1, that’s really the route that local commuters take. We thought that being on U.S. 1 was really a significant advantage to being off of I-95 as it related to a residential community that was going to be focused on the Jacksonville market.”
The uniqueness of the site, which includes two miles of frontage on the intracoastal and 400 acres of oak forest, was and is a major factor.
“That was something we could capitalize on,” he said. “When you looked at the driving distance from the Southside market place, it wasn’t that difficult of a sell.”
O’Shea said Hines is actively looking at future projects, but he said they didn’t have anything right now.
“We will be actively involved in Palencia for at least the next five years,” he said. “Our next project would have to be the right opportunity. It could be commercial or it could be another planned community.”
O’Shea has been married to Mona, who is currently in law school at Florida Coastal, for almost 11 years. They have three children, Dylan 5; Connor, 4 and Sophia, 2. When he is not working, he enjoys playing golf, reading suspense novels, traveling and coaching his son’s soccer team.