JACKSONVILLE, FLA. — Schafer Development has acquired the former Jax Raceways site with plans for a 1.5 million-square-foot industrial business park.
“We’ve been working on it (acquiring the property) for two years,” said Steve Schafer, president of Schafer Development. “It’s ideally located near the airport, the seaport area and Interstate 95. There’s a lot of great activity in Jacksonville,” Schafer said.
Between 1968 and 2004 the property operated as Gator Speedway, New Jacksonville Speedway and JAX Dragstrip, and most recently had been owned in partnership with Lennar Homes and GMAC. It is situated on Pecan Park Road.
“It was mostly vacant land. The grandstands and everything had already been removed because the owner was going to proceed with a residential development. Partway into the project, they stopped,” Schafer said.
Over the past two years, Schafer Development, based in Farmington Hills, Mich., has developed other sites in Jacksonville including New Berlin Commerce Park (860,000 square feet); Main Street Commerce Park (810,000 square feet); and Faye Road Commerce Park (350,000 square feet). The newly acquired land will connect with Main Street Commerce Park.
Schafer said that they are already in discussions with one potential user.
“We’ve rezoned it back to industrial,” Schafer said. We’re working on our preliminary engineering and concurrency. We hope to have everything started by late 2008 or early 2009 and we think the market demand is strong and should absorb fairly quickly.”