For much of the 20th century, The St. Joe Co. was a Jacksonville-based conglomerate with a dominant position in Florida business and politics.
However, the company has largely been under the radar since selling off its industrial assets in the late 1990s to focus on real estate development and moving its headquarters to the Florida Panhandle.
Panama City Beach-based St. Joe took a step toward increasing its visibility July 24 by holding its first quarterly conference call in more than a decade.
“As we discussed at our 2025 annual meeting of shareholders back in May, we committed to launching quarterly earnings calls to provide our shareholders and the investor community with another opportunity to engage with management and ask questions about our business and performance,” CEO Jorge Gonzalez said during the call.
“We have always been an open and transparent company that welcomes engagement in any form throughout the year,” he said.
According to investment websites that track conference calls by public companies, it was the first quarterly call for St. Joe since 2014. Gonzalez became CEO in late 2015.
The company formerly known as the St. Joe Paper Co. was created as a holding company for assets owned by Alfred I. duPont after his death in 1935.
The assets included a paper company in Port St. Joe, a sugar company in South Florida and a majority interest in the Florida East Coast Railway.
But its biggest asset was about 1 million acres in the Panhandle, representing about 3% of all privately owned land in Florida.
The land was accumulated by duPont and his brother-in-law, Ed Ball, in the 1920s. Ball became CEO of St. Joe and was considered by many to be the most powerful man in Florida until his death in 1981.
By the mid-1990s, St. Joe decided to sell off its industrial assets to focus on developing its land, which was mostly timber but included prime untouched beachfront property in the Panhandle.
St. Joe, which moved the headquarters to the Panhandle in 2010, began by focusing on resort communities but has been expanding with more commercial and hospitality properties in recent years.
“Over the past several years, we have evolved from primarily a transactional land sales company to a diversified real estate operating company with multiple recurring revenue streams,” Gonzalez said.
“Our strategy centers on growing and enhancing the ecosystem in Northwest Florida by developing scalable master plan residential communities and businesses and hospitality and commercial leasing that generate recurring revenue,” he said.
“We call this our virtuous circle of value creation where investments in one area enhance the value of our adjacent assets.”
St. Joe reported second-quarter revenue rose 16% to $129.1 million and earnings rose 20% to $29.5 million, or 51 cents a share.
“What is particularly encouraging is the continued growth of our recurring revenue streams. Leasing revenue increased by 11% to a quarterly record, and hospitality revenue increased 10% to a quarterly record,” Gonzalez said.
“Through the first six months of 2025, recurring revenue is now 63% of our total revenue, which is a significant transformation of the company.”
It’s a company that Ed Ball and Alfred duPont wouldn’t recognize, and people who remember it from its Jacksonville heyday might not recognize it either.
But if quarterly conference calls start increasing its visibility beyond the Panama City area, Jacksonville investors may start to take notice of St. Joe again.
Two mergers involving banks with branches in the Jacksonville market were announced last week.
Nashville, Tennessee-based Pinnacle Financial Partners Inc. and Columbus, Georgia-based Synovus Financial Corp. announced a merger valued at $8.6 billion July 24.
In a much smaller deal announced July 23, Fitzgerald, Georgia-based Colony Bankcorp. Inc. announced an $86.1 million agreement to buy Thomasville, Georgia-based TC Bancshares Inc.
Synovus has 88 branches in Florida, including three in Jacksonville and one each in Fernandina Beach and Yulee, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data.
Pinnacle, which entered Northeast Florida in 2024, has one branch in Jacksonville and a second in Ponte Vedra Beach. Those are Pinnacle’s only Florida offices.
The two banks combined will have less than a 1% share of deposits in the Jacksonville market, according to FDIC data. The companies did not announce any plans to close branches after the merger.
“This is a strategic expansion, not a market consolidation,” said Synovus CEO Kevin Blair in a conference call, according to a transcript posted by the companies.
“The merger creates a complementary footprint that fits together like puzzle pieces. It expands across high growth markets and positions us for sustained success. It also allows us to concentrate our resources in top tier growth markets,” he said.
Blair will become CEO of the merged company, which will take on the Pinnacle name. The corporate headquarters will be in Atlanta with the Pinnacle Bank subsidiary headquartered in Nashville.
“It is a merger which has minimal disruption and maximum impact. We’re expanding without displacing. Local market leadership and community relationships remain intact,” Blair said.
The companies said Scott Keith, Pinnacle’s regional president in the Jacksonville area, will become regional leader for North and Central Florida after the merger.
The companies are merging with an exchange of stock with current Pinnacle shareholders ending up with 51.5% of shares of the combined company and Synovus stockholders with 48.5%.
TC Federal Bank has only four branches, including a Jacksonville office opened in 2023. Its other branches are in Thomasville, Tallahassee and Savannah.
Colony Bankcorp has 30 full-service branches, all in Georgia, with loan offices in Tallahassee and Birmingham, Alabama.
“The combination is a transformational step that enhances our franchise and positions us for sustained long-term growth in key markets, both in Georgia and Florida,” Colony CEO Heath Fountain said in a conference call.
“It enhances what we were already doing in Tallahassee and Savannah and provides us entry into two great markets, Thomasville, Georgia, and Jacksonville, Florida, two markets that we’ve long desired to be in,” he said.
Holding company TC Bancshares went public in 2021 by selling 4.9 million shares at $10 each.
Colony agreed to buy the company’s shares for $21.25 in cash each or 1.25 shares of Colony stock.
The combined company will have about $3.8 billion in assets and $3.1 billion in deposits.
Jacksonville-based Regency Centers Corp. said July 24 it acquired five Southern California suburban shopping centers for $357 million.
The properties totaling 630,000 square feet of space are all in a master-planned community in Orange County.
The portfolio is 96% occupied and located in a community with an average household income of about $200,000.
“The addition of this portfolio enhances our position within one of the most supply-constrained coastal markets in the U.S.,” said John Mehigan, Regency’s senior vice president of investments in the West region, in a news release.
Regency had 72 properties in California as of March 31, its second-largest market behind Florida with 92.
The company had a total of 483 properties at the end of the first quarter.
Regency funded $200 million of the purchase by issuing 2.77 million limited common partnership units that could be convertible into common stock.
It also assumed $150 million of mortgage debt and spent $7 million to pay off a single secured loan.
Although CSX Corp. reported lower revenue and earnings for the second quarter, Deutsche Bank analyst Richa Harnain saw enough positive trends to upgrade her rating on the Jacksonville-based railroad company.
“We candidly lament not having upgraded the stock once we started noting the significant improvement in CSX’s weekly service metrics early in the quarter,” Harnain said in a July 24 research note.
“This positive trend, combined with increasing speculation about railroad M&A likely involving the company, made us (like many market participants) increasingly positive on the stock,” she said.
“However, we wanted more conclusive evidence of the sustainability of these positive trends and the company’s capacity to convert improved service into enhanced financial performance.”
Harnain upgraded her rating from “hold” to “buy” after seeing evidence of improved efficiency in CSX’s operations.
Merger speculation about CSX was already heating up before western railroad company Union Pacific Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp., CSX’s rail rival in the east, announced a deal July 29 to create a transcontinental railway.
That sparked rumors that the other big western railroad, BNSF Railway, will make a bid for CSX.
CSX Chief Executive Joe Hinrichs said in the company’s earnings conference call that the company is open to anything that could enhance shareholder value.
“We think the (carefully worded) statements around openness towards M&A will be well-taken by the market,” Harnain said.
Ratings agency AM Best said July 24 it affirmed its financial strength rating of “A+” (superior) and long-term issuer credit rating of “aa-“ (superior) for Jacksonville-based health insurer Florida Blue and its affiliates.
AM Best also affirmed a long-term credit issuer rating of “a-“ (excellent) for Florida Blue’s parent company, GuideWell Mutual Holding Corp.
GuideWell is the largest company based in Jacksonville, with 2024 revenue of almost $33 billion, ranking it 136th in the Fortune 500.
AM Best said the ratings for Florida Blue reflect its balance sheet strength, strong operating performance, neutral business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management.