$40 million worth of land in southern St. Johns County recently acquired from Rayonier
By Stuart Korfhage
Posted Feb 14, 2018 at 2:01 AM
St. Augustine Record
A company called First Coast Land and Timber LLC recently completed $40 million worth of land deals to acquire about 11,000 acres of property in southern St. Johns County.
The land was purchased from Rayonier, a real estate investment trust, in two transactions. The first was in December 2017 and the second last week.
Most of the parcels acquired are between Interstate 95 and U.S. 1, south of Watson Road. The property is mostly contiguous and extends down to the Flagler County border.
The agent for the property, Jacksonville attorney John Sefton, did not respond to an email on Tuesday.
Alejandro Barbero, Rayonier director of strategic development and communications, said the offer was unsolicited. He wouldn’t speculate on the future intentions of the new owners and said that Rayonier’s focus was on getting good value for its land.
“That land was held by the REIT and every now and then we get unsolicited offers, and we continuously look at our portfolio and our mission here is to enhance the portfolio,” Barbero said. “When offers like that come in, we consider them, and if it’s a good opportunity, we execute the transaction.”
It’s unclear what the immediate plans are for the property, but that part of the county is being rapidly developed, especially for new homes.
Home builder Toll Brothers doesn’t currently have anything working in the southern part of the county, but it is working in the northern section. It was involved in the St. Augustine Shores prior to the recession.
Steve Merten, president of the Northeast Florida Division, said he isn’t surprised to see the growth spread south. (Toll Brothers has no involvement with the Rayonier sale.)
“You have to assume that it’s going to push down that way,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard for builders to recognize the strength of St. Augustine. There is a lot of growth that is going on down there.”
All of the land purchased from Rayonier is currently designated as Rural/Silviculture on the county’s Future Land Use Map. So a developer would have to apply to the county to get the use changed to residential before building any houses — if that’s what the plan would be. However, many other developments have successfully completed that process over the years as the county’s population has nearly doubled since 2000 to about 235,000.
One of the parcels in the Rayonier sale fronts State Road 206, directly across the street from Pedro Menendez High School. That’s very close to where a major development called Kings Grant was proposed. However, the County Commission voted it down about two years ago, worried that it constituted urban sprawl because it was so isolated from other developments.
The developers currently are engaged with the county in a lawsuit over that decision
However, residential growth is making its way steadily down U.S. 1 toward S.R. 206. And development has also increased from the Intracoastal Waterway west on S.R. 206 toward U.S. 1.
In addition to the First Coast Land and Timber acquisition, there are other large tracts of land available in southern St. Johns County. More than 8,000 acres of property known as the Hutson Ranch, owned by local developer David Hutson, was divided into four parcels and put up for sale by Davidson Realty in 2016.
The land is west of Interstate 95 and is cut into four unequal pieces at the intersection of S.R. 206 and County Road 305. None of the parcels has been sold yet.
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