- January 29, 2025
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New commercial space is coming to Longboat Key this fall.
Mark Ursini, president and founder of Brista Homes, said the company’s Brista Commons project located at the 3100 block of Gulf of Mexico Drive should wrap up construction late this fall.
The project will bring 14,000 square feet of commercial space to the mid-key location. Included in the commercial lot will be an office for Brista Realty, an anchor tenant Couch, two smaller spaces and an out parcel.
Ursini said the construction team is about 50% complete with the necessary drainage work and concrete extension block walls should be completed within a few weeks.
Then, the team can move on to setting trusses and, later this year, move toward interior finishing touches.
“We’re looking forward to starting the interior finishes and hoping to be complete by fall of this year,” Ursini said.
This should put the project’s completion date around October or November of this year, according to Ursini.
Ursini submitted building permits in August 2024, but construction was postponed until after hurricanes Helene and Milton. The project officially broke ground in November 2024.
The hurricanes set construction back a little, but Ursini said the more challenging aspect came before construction during the approval process from the Florida Department of Transportation and environmental regulations.
Those approvals and the COVID-19 pandemic-born remote work delayed the project's start date originally, Ursini said.
With a completion date in sight, Ursini is working to get all the spaces leased out.
The anchor tenant, Couch, already has a finalized lease.
Couch will be a high-end, independent furniture store that occupies four of the available spaces in Brista Commons. The store will include a 5,000-square-foot showroom and full design services.
Two smaller spaces in the main Brista Commons space are 1,500 square feet and 1,266 square feet, neither of which has finalized leases.
There is also a 3,422-square-foot out parcel on the lot. Ursini said he is in talks with potential leases for all the available spaces in Brista Commons.
The annual leases are about $40 per square foot, which means the smallest available space at $1,266 would have an annual lease of about $50,000.
Those leases are also triple-net, meaning the tenants are responsible for paying taxes, insurance and maintenance for the space.
Brista Commons will also be home to Brista Realty’s new Longboat Key office. In a previous article about the project, Ursini said about 80% of Brista’s projects are on Longboat Key, so having their offices on the island seemed like a natural fit.
“Everything feels great,” Ursini said of the project. “We’re very excited about having our offices down there, too."
About three years ago, Ursini decided to use part of the land near the 3100 block of GMD for residential use. He wanted to rezone the lots behind what is now Brista Commons but, to do so, a town referendum was required to allow more residential density.
Those lots were previously zoned as “office institutional,” which had been zoned that way since at least the 1960s.
In November 2021, town voters allowed Ursini to move forward with plans to increase 0.86 acres in density from office institutional use to residential use.
Those residential homes are located behind the Brista Commons site and the homes were expected to have values of about $2 million to $2.5 million.
The Brista Commons project then gained approval from the town’s Planning and Zoning Board in April 2022.
