Hines, Key Group Plan $500M Florida Space Coast Industrial Campus

Author: Gail Kalinoski, Commercial Property Executive

Taking advantage of the growing private aerospace industry on Florida’s Space Coast, Hines is teaming up with Key Group to develop a $500 million, 3 million-square-foot Class A industrial campus providing a modern logistics hub near Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral in Brevard County.

The project will be built in three phases with Phase I set to break ground in early 2024 and deliver three rear-load industrial buildings totaling more than 639,000 square feet across 50 acres by 2025. Phase II will include two industrial buildings spanning nearly 466,000 square feet across 50 acres and Phase III will feature a mixed-use development on 350 acres. Details about the third phase will be released at a later date.

Space Coast Innovation Park will span 450 acres in the heart of Florida’s Space Coast in Brevard County. It will be located along Grissom Parkway and Perimeter Road, within the boundaries of Space Coast Regional Airport’s federally licensed Exploration Spaceport in Titusville, Fla.

The site is located 10 miles from Kennedy Space Center’s vehicle and assembly building and will offer aerospace and defense firms direct access from I-95 to SR-407, with a direct connection to the newly expanded NASA Causeway Bridge. It will be ideally positioned to accommodate the strong demand for highly specialized industrial space requiring payload assembly and transport to Kennedy Space Center launch pads.

Space Coast growth

The Space Coast is the epicenter of Florida’s growing space industry and is home to the nation’s largest concentrations of aerospace, defense and technology employers including Blue Origin, SpaceX, Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin, L3 Harris and Amazon, among others. The U.S. Air Force also recently selected Patrick Space Force Base on the Florida Space Coast as its preferred headquarters location for the U.S. Space Force’s Space Training and Readiness Command operations.

Ryan Wood, managing director at Hines, said in a prepared statement the global real estate investment, development and property management firm felt the timing was right to create a best-in-class logistics hub for aerospace companies requiring direct access to Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral than locations further south could offer. Wood cited the rapid commercialization and privatization of the aerospace industry and estimates that the space economy will generate more than $1 trillion in annual sales by 2040 as incentives for moving forward with plans for the state-of-the-art industrial park.

Partnering with Hines

Kathleen Yonce, CEO of Titusville-based Key Group, told the Wall Street Journal she started searching for land in the Cape Canaveral area in 2019 and signed a deal with the Titusville-Cocoa Airport Authority in 2022. She said they designed the project with the airport authority, which owns the property. This year, Key Group, a commercial real estate development, brokerage and management firm that also has offices in Boca Raton, Fla., and Rock Hill, S.C., brought on Hines as a partner in the project.

Yonce said in prepared remarks that partnering with Hines enabled her firm to leverage its vision with Hines’ world-class mixed-use development and investment expertise. She said they will be working with aerospace tenants to provide institutional grade facilities and tap into resources from the Exploration Spaceport, including incentives from Space Florida, the North Brevard Economic Development Zone and the Economic Development Commission of Florida’s Space Coast.

Yonce added there is an Exploration Spaceport Master plan underway that will offer multi-modal payload transport that is located within Port Canaveral’s Foreign Trade Zone.

The project has grown significantly since last October, when Key Group filed initial plans to develop just under 1 million square feet of space on 50 acres, according to FLORIDA TODAY. That plan called for three large manufacturing buildings and six other buildings totaling 917,099 square feet.

Other project team members include design firm Ware Malcomb and Alston Construction.

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