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Talk of the bay

N.C. company scouting brownfield sites in Florida for development

By JEFF HARRINGTON
Published May 30, 2005

Tom Darden and his team at Cherokee Investment Partners smell opportunity when they go to the local landfill or other industrial sites whose grounds carry the pollutants of business past.

Cherokee, based in Raleigh, N.C., is a niche developer focused on buying and redeveloping "environmentally impaired real estate," better known in the industry as brownfields. Since its 1990 launch, the company has spent more than $1-billion buying more than 330 contaminated sites across the United States, Canada and Western Europe. A typical investment: about $10-million.

Now Cherokee has set its sites on the Tampa Bay area.

During a visit to St. Petersburg last week, Cherokee executives said they are actively scouting for land in the bay area and elsewhere in Florida. It has only one Florida project, in Lakeland.

Their interest is a sign Florida's real estate market has matured, with land prices in urban areas fetching enough that it makes some economic sense to invest in brownfields.

The more brownfields are used for new projects, the theory goes, the less farmland and other more pristine "greenfields" will be needed to satisfy growth. Most of the cleaned-up land is used for residential and mixed-use projects involving office and retail.

[Last modified May 27, 2005, 17:50:02]