The company behind Doc Ford’s and other restaurant concepts has bought a waterfront hot spot in the Tyrone area. A St. Pete real estate firm has a new home in the Grand Central District. A home in Belleair sold for $5 million. The industrial sector remains hot with the sale of a warehouse near Largo.

Here’s this week’s round of local real estate news.

Waterfront hotspot

HM Restaurant Group, the Sanibel, Florida company that operates Doc Ford’s on the St. Pete Pier, bought the waterfront property that formerly housed Joe’s Crab Shack and The Green Iguana Bar & Grill in the Tyrone area.

HM Restaurant paid $3.45 million for the building at 8790 Bay Pines Blvd. in a deal that closed on Wednesday, Pinellas County property records show.

The building is on a 2.2 acre waterfront parcel. The 6,750-square-foot building has 306 feet of water frontage as well as a 4,150-square-foot porch and deck. Vector Commercial Real Estate represented the seller, Chesapeake Bay Holding Co. Inc.

“This has been a great property for us. We’ve had it leased 18 of the 20 years we’ve held it,” said Ken Heretick, founder of Vector and part owner of Chesapeake Bay. “With land values so high, it just made more sense to sell it at this time.”

The covered deck and porch at 8790 Bay Pines Blvd.

HM Restaurant Group operates Doc Ford’s in Sanibel Island, Captiva Island and Ft. Meyers Beach, in addition to the restaurant at the Pier. It also operates Dixie Fish Company and The Whale, both seafood restaurants in Ft. Myers Beach.

A spokesman for HM Restaurant Group did not respond to requests for information about what it plans for the Bay Pines property.

Grand Central’s newest company

Weller Residential, a multifamily real estate investment and property management company, has a new corporate office. The company bought a 3,000-square-foot office building at 2880 1st Ave. N. and the adjacent vacant lot to the east for $1.24 million. The prior occupant vacated on April 1 and the deal closed April 23, said George Quay IV, managing partner.

“We intend to modernize and improve the interior, exterior landscaping and vacant lot to further improve the area and in line with other recent improvements made in the area and especially on that block. We will use the building as our corporate office and hope to occupy by the end of the year,” Quay said in an email to St. Pete Catalyst. “The building was attractive to us given its central location in Pinellas and access to entertainment and restaurants. We also believe that post-renovation, we will create a modern, collaborative work space for our associates. Lastly we see this as a long term investment with tremendous upside.”

Weller Residential’s current address is in downtown St. Pete in the Morgan Stanley Tower. The company provides property management, construction management, asset management and investment management services throughout the Southeast U.S.

Gated community

A waterfront home at 413 Saint Andrews Drive in Belleair sold for $5 million on April 23. The 9,184 square foot home has five bedrooms, five-and-a-half bathrooms and is in the Belleview Island gated community.

County property records show the sellers were Thomas and Victoria Cummins and the buyers were John and Bonni Stokely. Both the seller and the buyer were represented by Martha Thorn of Coldwell Banker Realty-Belleair & The Beaches. Earlier this year, Thorn was the listing agent for a Largo home that sold for $9.85 million, in what is believed to be the largest residential sale in the Tampa Bay area since January 2020.

413 Saint Andrews Drive (photo credit: Realtor.com)

Class A industrial

A California company paid $28.6 million for warehouse property near Largo.

Chatsmouth LLC bought two buildings with a total of 192,000 square feet on Wednesday from a company associated with Harrod Development in Tampa, county records show.

The buildings at 8515 126th Ave. N. and 8615 126th Ave. N. are in Starkey Lakes South, a Class A industrial development built in 2017.

The buyer, Chatsmouth LLC in Porter Ranch, California, is headed by Rishi Kapadia, who also is president of TRK Development, a national commercial real estate development firm, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Across the Bay

Marina Pointe at Westshore Marina District officially topped off at 17 stories.

BTI Partners, a Fort Lauderdale-based real estate and land developer, completed construction of the roof of the tower a little over a year after the official groundbreaking in February 2020. Plaza Construction is the general contractor and the architect is Kobi Karp.

The high-rise tower will be home to 113 luxury condominiums and seven townhomes with views of Tampa Bay and the St. Pete skyline. The residences range in price from the $800,000s to over $3 million.

Condo buyers are expected to be able to move in in the second half of 2022, a news release said.

Westshore Marina District is near Westshore and Gandy Boulevards on Old Tampa Bay. The district also includes other residential projects built by WCI by Lennar, The Related Group and Bainbridge, as well as a 70,000-square-foot town center with retail tenants.

Topping off at Marina Pointe at Westshore Marina District (photo credit: BTI Partners)