Doing Business in Lake Nona

To call Lake Nona a booming submarket is an understatement of epic proportion.

The 17-square-mile master-planned community has been a work in progress for decades, but during the past year — even with the lingering effects of a pandemic — Lake Nona has notched some of the biggest business deals and projects in Central Florida. This week, Orlando Business Journal highlights some of that activity in our Doing Business in Lake Nona special issue.

Consider these examples:

• Nearly 800 new homes are in the pipeline in Lake Nona, which already reported a 28% sales jump in this year’s first quarter. The community frequently is recognized as one of the nation’s top-selling communities.
• The Walt Disney Co. — a big player in Central Florida with its numerous theme parks and resorts in town — purchased a 60-acre site in Lake Nona, where it will build a new office campus and relocate 2,000 jobs from the West Coast.
• The fully leased Shoppes at Nona Place sold for $35 million, or about $578 per square foot, earlier this year — 2021’s highest recorded per-square-foot price so far.
• Work is expected to begin by year’s end on Brooks Rehabilitation’s 60-bed rehab hospital, which will result in 170-200 new workers. In addition, Orlando Health opened a freestanding ER, and AdventHealth is developing a mixed-use campus in Lake Nona.
• The Lake Nona Wave Hotel — loaded with high-tech amenities to appeal to leisure and business travelers — is set to open sometime this fall in the Lake Nona Town Center.

I’m almost tired from just typing all that. But it shows us the Lake Nona community has grown into a key center of business activity — with even more to come in the next year and beyond. In fact, all the work underway in and around Lake Nona amounts to billions of dollars in construction, plus the creation of thousands of new jobs — critical elements of bolstering the region’s economic recovery in the next decade.

It’s an amazing evolution from being a nondescript cow pasture 30-some years ago to one of the nation’s fastest-growing communities in real estate, medical technology and advancements, and more.

For the full article, visit the Orlando Business Journal online.