A roughly 92,000-square-foot office building in Lake Mary is being razed to make way for two new industrial buildings aimed at small and midsize businesses, with developers Banyan Street Capital and Lafayette Street Capital lining up a $20.1 million construction loan to get the project moving. The site, known as Contact Pointe, sits at 3210 Lake Emma Road on a 23.3-acre parcel and will be rebranded as Lake Emma Gateway once the new buildings go up.
CBRE arranged the $20.1 million construction loan, which was provided by Atlantic Union Bank, according to Connect CRE. The financing will support turning the former office campus into a two-building Class A shallow-bay industrial development, the outlet reports. Per GrowthSpotter, the project will total 158,305 square feet of warehouse space split across buildings of 71,344 and 86,961 square feet.
From Half-Empty Office Park to Industrial Site
The Contact Pointe building dates to 1996, per county records cited by GrowthSpotter, and was sold by Exeter Property Group to Banyan Street Capital on June 9, 2025, according to Cushman and Wakefield's second-quarter 2025 report. The property last changed hands for $6 million, a steep drop from the $15 million it fetched in a May 2019 sale — a decline of about 60%, per the same report. At the time of the recent sale, the building was leased to just two tenants and was 52% leased, according to Transwestern marketing materials, which had pitched the site for either office repositioning or industrial redevelopment, describing its expiring leases and unoccupied space as offering flexibility for new development.
Lake Emma Gateway is listed as a speculative development currently under construction, per the Lake Mary development dashboard. The buildings will rise 35 feet, 8 inches tall and the site will include 286 parking spaces, counting the 56 that already exist. Florida Engineering Group, based in Orlando, prepared the site plan, while CBRE notes the design includes rear loading areas and flexible layouts meant to accommodate multiple tenants.
Shallow-Bay Format Targets Smaller Tenants
The shallow-bay design gives the buildings less depth than large distribution warehouses typically have, allowing the space to be divided among smaller users rather than leased to a single big-box tenant. Taylor Crowder said in a Nov. 12 release that the sponsors saw an opportunity to create value by redeveloping an underused office site into modern shallow-bay industrial space. Representatives for Banyan and Lafayette could not be reached for comment before publication, per GrowthSpotter's reporting.
Seminole County's industrial vacancy rate stood at 4.7% at the end of September, far tighter than the broader Orlando metro's 10.6% vacancy rate, according to GrowthSpotter. Occupied industrial space in the county grew by 275,000 square feet through the first nine months of the year. Orlando buildings sized between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet — roughly the range of the new Lake Emma Gateway buildings — carried a 6.8% vacancy rate and average annual asking rents of $12.68 per square foot, compared with $10.48 per square foot across Orlando industrial properties overall before additional operating expenses.
Marcus and Millichap's second-quarter Orlando report found that tenant departures from industrial spaces smaller than 50,000 square feet were concentrated in properties built before 1980, with newer small-bay properties showing more stable demand. A similarly sized small-bay warehouse planned near Florida Mall in Orlando, totaling 86,065 square feet, was described by the Orlando Business Journal as helping meet growing demand for small spaces, though that assessment was tied to that specific project rather than the broader market.
Developers' Broader Partnership
Miami-based Banyan Street Capital and Chicago-based Lafayette Street Capital have previously partnered on office investments, and the Lake Emma Gateway project follows their purchase of Harborview Plaza for $39.5 million earlier this year — their third joint investment. Plans for that property include a renovated lobby, tenant lounge, cafe, and waterfront patio, a markedly different bet than the industrial conversion now underway in Lake Mary.
