Home Depot retail center coming to Poinciana

March 14, 2007

Home improvement do-it-yourselfers and the more than 65,000 residents of Poinciana will soon have a neighborhood Home Depot retail center.

Plans by the world’s largest home-improvement retailer have been approved by the Osceola County Commission for the development of a Home Depot retail center on 13 acres at the northeast corner of Poinciana Boulevard and State Road 17-92 in Poinciana.

The site was purchased from Avatar Properties Inc. which is marketing 13 adjacent acres to developers for a complementary, family-oriented retail shopping center to better serve Poinciana’s growing population.

The Home Depot will have 104,208 sq. ft. of indoor retail space, plus a 34,760 sq. ft. outdoor garden center. It will be the third such store in Osceola, joining operational centers in Kissimmee and St. Cloud.

Construction of the Poinciana store will begin this spring with an opening expected this fall, according to Don Harrison, public relations manager for Home Depot’s Southern Division.

Headquartered in Atlanta, The Home Depot, Inc. operates 2,163 retail stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico and China. The company is one of the largest diversified wholesale distributors in the United States with nearly 1,000 locations in North America offering products and services for building, improving and maintaining homes, businesses and municipal infrastructures.

The company, which posted net sales of $90.8 billion and net earnings of $5.8 billion in fiscal 2006, employs approximately 355,000 associates and has been recognized by FORTUNE magazine as the # 1 Most Admired Specialty Retailer and the # 13 Most Admired Corporation in America for 2006.

The Home Depot joins a growing list of retailers in Poinciana. The community’s retail hub in Poinciana Towne Center features several restaurants and over 70 businesses including a WalMart SuperCenter, a Winn-Dixie Marketplace, and the Promenade Shopping Center anchored by a Publix Supermarket. They will soon be joined by the Cypress Plaza Shopping Center which will feature three free-standing restaurants and a number of national and regional tenants.

Nearby, is the brand new Solivita Marketplace which just opened the first phase of what is planned to ultimately encompass over 60 acres at the corner of Cypress Parkway and Marigold Avenue. Among the current tenants are four restaurants, two banks, and a Walgreens Drugs.

Poinciana, a 47,000-acre master-planned community in northwest Osceola and northeast Polk counties, is being developed by Avatar, the community’s primary homebuilder. Avatar also is developing Poinciana Office & Industrial Park where national and international tenants currently have over 3.5 million square feet under roof and over 2,200 employees, many residents of Poinciana.

For more information about the Home Depot retail center in Poinciana, contact Home Depot’s Don Harrison at (770) 384-4418. To learn more about Avatar’s retail land opportunities, contact Hank Yunes, Avatar’s vice president of commercial operations, at (305) 442-7000, or Tony Iorio, Avatar’s vice president of land development, at (407) 933-5000.