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Osceola mixed-use development has $1.2B price tag. Will it be cost-efficient?

On Dec. 10, the Osceola board of county commissioners approved the $1.2 billion Center for International Commerce. The 1.5 million square-foot, 94-acre project will begin construction in June 2014 across from Osceola Heritage Park and is expected to be finished five years later.

This project caught our eye because it presents a large and expensive example of a popular trend in commercial real estate -- the mixed-used development.

Although it is being pitched as a place for South American and Asian companies to find U.S. and European customers, the Compass project, as it is being called for short, is going to include 728 homes, a 500-room hotel and 1.5 million square feet of retail and wholesale space. In other words, this single piece of property is going to be a lot of things to a lot of people.

Mixed-use developments are praised by urban planners because they are highly concentrated and therefore are efficient uses of space. Even so, they are often more presentable than big-box stores or shopping malls, which seem to be losing favor with U.S. customers.

That being said, a $1.2 billion investment needs to be relevant for decades if it is going to pay for itself. It will be interesting to see whether the Compass project's mixed-use plan is a success or an expensive example of a fad.

Source: The Orlando Business Journal, "Osceola County's Compass project to have $1.4B economic impact," Richard Bilbao, Dec. 11, 2012

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