The timber and real estate company envisions its 261-acre Wildlight project as the beginning of something bigger — it owns another 25,000 acres within fi ve miles of the project.

In early 2013, Chris Corr was looking for a job. Corr, 54, comes from a long line of developers. His grandfather moved his family to Florida almost 70 years ago from Michigan and began developing the community of Apollo Beach on nearly 6,000 acres on Tampa Bay. His father finished building it; one of the community’s schools, Thomas P. Corr Elementary, is named after him.

In 1992, Walt Disney Co. hired Chris Corr to help plan and develop Celebration, Disney’s master-planned community in Osceola County. Six years later, he went to St. Joe Co., where, as chief strategy officer, he oversaw the development of some of the company’s timber holdings in Northwest Florida, including the creation of Northwest Beaches International Airport.

In between, he served a term as a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives and landed a series of political appointments, including seats on the 1997-98 Constitution Revision Commission and the University of Florida’s board of trustees.

The housing collapse of 2008 forced St. Joe to eliminate Corr’s position. He landed at AECOM, the global consulting giant, but had been itching to get back into the real estate game. As 2012 turned into 2013, he got his chance: A company — Corr won’t say which one — with land to develop offered him a job.

Among those he called to ask for advice was former Gov. Jeb Bush. After listening to Corr describe the opportunity, Bush threw Corr a curveball. “What about Rayonier?” asked Bush, then serving on the company’s board of directors. “You should pay attention to them.”

Based 10 miles from the Georgia border in the northeast corner of the state, Rayonier is one of the largest land owners in the United States — and one of the largest private landowners in Florida. The company owns or leases more than 1.8 million acres of timberland across the Southeast, including 350,000 acres in Florida. About 200,000 acres of the firm’s holdings lie along the fast-growing I-95 corridor between Daytona Beach and Savannah, Ga.

With real estate markets beginning to flicker back to life, Rayonier management had decided that the company could make more money harvesting rooftops rather than timber.

Corr called Rayonier, and a few months later, the company hired him to run its real estate division, Raydient Places + Properties.

Rayonier, like most large timber companies, has always done some development in areas where urban growth sprawled toward its forests. Historically, the company has sold off between 1% and 1.5% of its holdings a year, using some of the proceeds to replenish its timber stock with cheaper land elsewhere and pocketing the rest as a premium. But the overall approach was fairly unsophisticated — the company mostly Rayonier spent $13 million to build a striking 55,000-sq.-ft. corporate headquarters in Wildlight, moving 150 employees. just sold off big tracts of raw land.

“Generally, when you have a large chunk of land, no one wants to pay you a premium for it,” says Rayonier President and CEO Dave Nunes, who joined the company in mid-2014.

Prep work

To unlock more value from its land, Rayonier knew it had to begin investing more to prep it for development. To identify exactly where it should focus, Corr and a small team of Rayonier employees and consultants began studying Rayonier’s coastal land, evaluating sites for things like market readiness and land attributes.

Rayonier eventually identified a handful of sites. One was near Savannah, where the company had some 20,000 acres of roughly contiguous land around I-95 and a nearby industrial park already in the works.

Another was in Nassau County, where Rayonier is the county’s largest private landowner, with more than 100,000 acres.

Nassau had several advantages. The state was planning to expand the interchange at I-95 and AIA and widen AIA. The company already had done a preliminary sector plan that covered roughly 25,000 acres in the area.

And while most of Jacksonville’s growth has historically been to the south and into affluent St. Johns County, growth was beginning to turn north; Nassau County’s share of the total building permits issued each year for the Jacksonville metropolitan area has roughly doubled since 2012.

“A couple of years from now, or five years or 10 years, that growth has to go north,” Nunes says. “And it has to go through us.”

Rayonier identified 261 acres next to the I-95/A1A interchange for what Corr calls the company’s “pioneer project” — a master-planned community whose first phase will include approximately 600 single-family homes, ranging from $175,000 to $400,000, plus 280 apartments and some 500,000 square feet of commercial space. The company dubbed the project Wildlight.

To take on the master plan, Corr reassembled some of the team that helped design Celebration for Disney [“Disney Alumni,” right], and the Disney influence has pervaded the planning process. The planning team, for example, organized “plussing sessions” in which it brought in consultants from real estate, retail, hospitality and other market segments to offer feedback on its plans. The plussing session term comes from Disney Animation, where Walt Disney had animators present their scenes to other animators, who would suggest ways to improve the work.

In those sessions, the group discussed how the northeastern corner of Florida feels more like coastal Georgia and South Carolina than the rest of coastal Florida. A Disney-esque theme emerged — Wildlight: “A Place for Florida Lowcountry Living.” Commercial buildings use muted colors and architecture meant to evoke the feel of rustic fishing sheds. Homes, which will feature prominent front porches, are being built in one of three styles: Early settlement, cottage or bungalow. One of the first streets Raydient built in the development has been named Floco Avenue, shorthand for Florida lowcountry. Even the name Wildlight came out of those plussing sessions; Rayonier execs say it’s meant to call to mind the feel of the sun setting over salt marshes and coastal forests. “Floridians know you’ve got to head north to get to the real South,” a narrator croons in one early advertisement for the project.

Rayonier has also emphasized what Celebration and St. Joe alumni call the “software” of the project. The very first thing built in Wildlight was an elementary school on land Rayonier donated at the center of the development. The company has negotiated deals with UF Health to build a health care and wellness campus, with AT&T and Comcast to provide ultra-fast internet service, and Florida Public Utilities to build a facility for about 55 employees.

Most significantly, Rayonier spent $13 million to build a striking corporate headquarters in Wildlight, moving 160 employees who had previously worked at three separate leased sites in Jacksonville into the 55,000-sq.-ft. building.

Wildlight “is going to be a big bold stroke, and I think that’s what that area needs,” says Jacksonville developer Peter Rummell, a friend and mentor of Corr’s who hired him at Disney and then at St. Joe. Corr “is a big thinker. He can reach out and put things together that most people wouldn’t.”

Friendly governments have helped Wildlight get off the ground. The Florida Department of Transportation is spend ing millions on road improvements around the development. The Nassau County School Board built the elementary school, and the University of Florida is building the health care and wellness campus. Rayonier persuaded the Florida Legislature to create a stewardship district for Wildlight to help with financing, similar to districts created for other large mixed-use projects around the state, including Babcock Ranch in Southwest Florida and Tavistock’s Sunbridge community on Mormon Churchowned ranchland in Central Florida.

Butting heads

But not everything has gone smoothly. Raydient is locked in a fight with Nassau County commissioners over who should pay for the public parks inside Wildlight. County leaders accuse Raydient of back ing out of a deal to finance the parks; Raydient says it is only obligated to provide the land. During this year’s legislative session, a bill emerged that would have ensured Rayonier did not have to pay for the parks — only to be scuttled after Nassau County protested. Rayonier executives insist they weren’t involved in the legislation.

Justin Taylor, a Nassau County commissioner who said at a recent public hearing that “I’m still trying to pull the knife out of my back,” says the controversy is beginning to sour some residents on the project. “I hear there are people who are very concerned about the project altogether — whereas at one point it was all, ‘This is great; this is wonderful for the community,’ ” Taylor says. “It’s leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths.”

Rayonier seems unmoved. Altogether, the company says it expects to invest between $50 million and $60 million in Wildlight — far more than it has ever spent on a development project. The stakes are enormous — both for Rayonier and for Northeast Florida.

Wildlight could become the first domino that pushes many thousands more acres over into development in a county where the population only recently topped 80,000 people.

The returns are just now starting to come in. Rayonier sold its first piece of commercial property in Wildlight last spring (a 1.3-acre commercial tract that sold for about $420,000) and its first residential lot a few months later.

Altogether, the company had closed on about $7.5 million worth of sales in Wildlight through the end of March. Those sales include commercial parcels for an apartment complex, a bank and the UF Health campus, plus 17 home sites that went for about $50,000 a lot. The first Wildlight resident moved in this summer.

Nunes and Corr say the company won’t stretch itself too far financially on the project — or get ahead of the market. One of Corr’s favorite mottos: “Think big, but act small.”

Rayonier

In mid-2014, Rayonier split its timber and manufacturing operations into separate, publicly traded companies.

The timber company, which includes Rayonier’s real estate business, has more than 330 employees and annual sales of $820 million. It’s led by Dave Nunes.

The manufacturing business, now called Rayonier Advanced Materials, has 4,200 employees, annual sales of $960 million and is based in Jacksonville. It’s led by Paul Boynton. It produces cellulose products for everything from cigarette filters and liquid crystal displays to food casings and pharmaceuticals.

Disney Alumni

Rayonier’s real estate division has hired nearly half a dozen former Disney executives, including Charles Adams, vice president in charge of Wildlight; Kent Findley as director of development design and planning; Janet Morris to oversee marketing; and Bill Cunningham, who leads the company’s Georgia projects. All but Morris worked for Chris Corr at St. Joe; Morris went on to the Pritzker Realty Group, where she helped lead the development of the Baldwin Park master-planned community just east of downtown Orlando.

 

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