By Carole Hawkins, [email protected]
AV Homes has finalized the purchase of about 80 acres near the St. Johns Town Center from the Skinner family.
The purchase price was just under $9.2 million, according to Duval County records.
AV Homes, a Scottsdale Arizona-based developer with communities in Arizona, Central Florida and South Carolina, plans to build 120 homes on the property. Details have not been finalized, but prices will start in the $300,000s, according to David Smith, Florida Division president for the company.
The plan is to break ground this fall on the community, to be called Old Still, and begin selling houses in early 2015.
Smith called the parcel the proverbial hole in the doughnut for development — a pristine property surrounded by existing communities that’s a one mile drive to the St. Johns Town Center and four miles from the beach. It’s a place people already come to for recreation and to work, shop and dine, he said.
“The opportunities for new homes in that area are very limited,” Smith said.
It will be the only new single-family home community within five miles, he said.
Being at the heart of what some think of as Jacksonville’s second Downtown, the property could have been developed for more density and more profit as apartments or an office high-rise, Smith said. But that’s not what the Skinner family wanted.
The oak hammock sits at the geographic center of 50,000 acres of land the Skinner family acquired at the turn of the 20th century for a turpentine operation. It was selected as the site of the family’s first Florida home.
Protective of the property’s oak trees, which are larger to reach around than four people holding hands, the family worked with AV Homes for months on a land plan.
“Financially it probably would have made more sense to do apartments, but we didn’t want to overdevelop it,” said Charles Skinner of The Charles Skinner Co., the agent for the Skinner family partnership that sold the land.
A Jacksonville resident, Smith said he has long enjoyed the city’s older neighborhoods of Riverside, Avondale and San Marco.
“We will not replicate that — but create a community with some of the design cues that made that area of town really special,” he said.
Architecture will include Georgian red-brick and low country houses, mixed with Mediterranean, French, and a little bit of Victorian. It will feel like driving through San Marco or Avondale, where no two homes are the same, he said.
For more information, visit avhomesinc.com.