Owners of the WestEnd Square — a shopping center home to a new Planet Fitness, Aldi and Five Below on Tallahassee’s west side — have sold a large portion of the property. Located at Ocala Road and Pensacola Street, the shopping center is the largest strip commercial property within a mile of Doak Campbell Stadium and Florida State’s campus.
A large 152,000 square-foot portion of the inline property, with the exception of Aldi’s 52,000 square-foot space (the grocer owns its space), sold for roughly $24 million. The outlying parcels that include Starbucks and a Tesla supercharging station remain under the ownership of Student Housing Partners LLC, a firm that manages more than a dozen student-centric properties.
The shopping center has undergone major renovation over the years. Last year, tornadoes ripped through Tallahassee and damaged parts of the WestEnd Square shopping center, including roof damage that had to be repaired.
“We finally feel like we’ve repositioned the shopping center to the point where we renovated it and brought it to a more modern and contemporary look,” said Dylan Leoni, who’s part of the management team at Student Housing Partners. “We brought in a lot of new great businesses and tenants … We spent all of this time getting this center to this point to put it out to the market.”
His dad, Steve Leoni, purchased the shopping center in 2003 and said this was a “good time to transact.” His company owns several properties west of the stadium and Leoni said there are plans to build a new hotel across the street from the shopping center.
“There’s no hotel from the university west of campus all the way to the airport,” Steve Leoni said. “We were lucky enough to have Marriott give us the franchise for a TownePlace Suites … It’s in the works.” At this time, Leoni said no permits have been issued and work is underway to draft the hotel’s design and an agreement with Marriott to build a 150-room hotel on the property.
Contact Economic Development Reporter TaMaryn Waters at tlwaters@tallahassee.com and follow @TaMarynWaters on X.