Fifty years and still passionate about our properties.
Florida’s Gulf coast has been discovered, over-built, flattened and rebuilt several times over since 1973. We have been in the same business, in the same square mile, for almost all of it.
In 1973 Sun City Center was twelve years old and still mostly orange grove. I–75 was a line on a map, the community had a few thousand residents rather than tens of thousands, and commercial real estate here meant whatever had been built to serve them — which was not much.
Whitgroup began that year with one lot, bought outright because there was no other way to buy it, and a conviction that a community filling up with retirees was going to need doctors, lawyers, title agents and accountants — and that all of them would need somewhere to work.
That lot sat empty for years before anything went up on it. It is the single most instructive thing about how this company has operated ever since.
Decade by decade.
Eight moments that explain how a single lot became nine buildings — and why it took fifty years rather than fifteen.
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1973
The first lot
One lot in Sun City Center, paid for in full. No building, no tenant, no plan beyond the belief that the land would be worth more to somebody than it cost us.
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1986
Center Plaza
Thirteen professional suites over two floors on Sun City Center Plaza, with an elevator — at the time an unusually ambitious building for a community this size. It is still the busiest thing we own and it is still full, nearly forty years on.
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2008 – 2009
Building through the crash
955 East Del Webb went up in 2008 and 959 the year after — the two worst years for Florida property in living memory, when almost nobody was starting anything. We could do it because we did not owe more on what we already had than the rent would carry. Doctors and lawyers still needed offices; the panic was in housing, not here.
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2014
957, closing the gap
Four suites dropped into the space between two buildings we already owned, each with its own door to the outside. Three consecutive addresses on one boulevard, matched deliberately so the street reads as one place.
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2020
Sun Plaza, and a different kind of building
Two buildings on US–301, finished in a year when nobody knew what was going to happen to anything. The larger of them is a purpose-built medical pavilion — stone, glass and a flat parapet rather than stucco and a tile roof — and it went to a hospital system.
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2022
Ian
The storm came ashore below Fort Myers, where our warehouse is, and its forecast cone sat over Sun City Center for two days before that. Every tenant in every building was back in operation inside ninety days. The fencing and the landscaping did not survive, which is the correct order for things to fail in.
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2023
Commonwealth 991 and 1007
Two buildings finished in the same year at the far end of the same boulevard, standing-seam metal roofs instead of tile because that is what fifty years of Florida weather teaches you. Nineteen thousand square feet between them, both leased before the year was out.
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Today
50 years and still going strong
86,075 square feet: eight buildings in and around Sun City Center and a warehouse in Fort Myers, with a second generation running the business. The plan for the next fifty years is recognizably the plan from the first fifty — buy what we can hold, build what we mean to keep, and answer the phone ourselves.
Looking for space,
need property management,
or looking to build?
Get in touch. We know which leases come up before anyone else does, and if what you need does not exist here yet, we can help you find it, or even build it for you.