By Anthony DeMatteo
Staff Writer
Jim Doyle said Jacksonville is the place to be in Florida, and the Shipyards will soon be part of the reason why.
Doyle, Shipyards’ Vice President of Sales and Marketing for LandMar, spoke to the Downtown Neighborhoods Council of Realtors Wednesday at the development site, answering questions in front of a scale model of Shipyards’ tower.
He said in about 30 months, the 38-story tower with 331 residences, six floors of resort-style amenities and retail space will open.
“If you look at all of Florida’s metropolitan markets, they’re not going to grow at the rate Jacksonville is going to grow,” said Doyle.
Anne Jessup, LandMar’s regional marketing manager, said Shipyards has approximately 150 refundable residential reservations for units that will range between $200,000 and $2 million, with an average price of about $350,000.
The development has not yet started selling units.
Some of those reservations, Doyle said, are from a population of baby boomers who are giving up suburban life for the city.
“Each one of the buildings we build is a neighborhood in vertical,” he said. “We’re not doing a gated, master-plan community. We did not feel like that was urban. Urban environments are open. They are designed to draw people in.”
As part of its development agreement, Shipyards promised to improve part of the Riverwalk and deed it to the city.
Shipyards will be a private development, with much of its land allowing for public access — a scenario Jessup compared to a beachfront community with ocean access.
Doyle said the public aspect of the development is its “biggest and best amenity.”
“We have one of the biggest, largest public walkways on waterfront in the state,” he said. “What we saw is, it could be done better.”
Shipyards’ improvements to the riverfront include a canopy of trees and building attractive destinations at the end of walking paths, said Doyle.
“What we think is, our residents will clearly be the number one user of the Riverwalk behind the Shipyards,” said Doyle. “It’s not a public obligation as much as it is a development opportunity to create a fixed asset for the amenity package.”
Doyle said work on the development’s portion of the Riverfront will begin soon.
“Our pledge to the city is we will start the public phase of the Riverwalk this summer and it will be complete within five years,” he said. “But we’ll probably be way ahead of that.”
Jessup said it is not known how many towers the development will include, with construction planned for more than 10 years.
“At this point, there’s so much flexibility I wouldn’t say we’ll have two buildings or four buildings,” she said. “The options are open.”