Retail powerhouse buys Windermere shopping center from Unicorp, Project Finance & Development
A Windermere-area shopping center built by two of Orlando’s most prominent developers has been sold to one of the nation’s retail real estate powerhouses.
Westside Shoppes, a roughly 70,000-square-foot retail plaza in Horizon West’s Lakeside Village neighborhood, was bought June 27 by an entity tied to Ohio-based Site Centers Corp. for $39 million, Orange County records show.
The property at the intersection of Winter Garden Vineland Road/County Road 535 and Lachlan Lane was built in 2017 as a partnership between Chuck Whittall’s Unicorp National Developments Inc., which appears as having a majority interest in the sale deed, and Dwight Saathoff’s Project Finance & Development LLC.
At the time its construction began, Orlando Business Journal reported that Westside Shoppes was valued at $15 million, meaning its worth appreciated by 160%.
The property, just north of the Publix-anchored Lakeside Village Center, is home to retailers and restaurants such as Gator’s Dockside Windermere, Panera Bread, AT&T Store, Kingdom Sushi, Jersey Mike’s and Dental Care at Westside Shoppes, among others.
Reached via email, Whittall said his team “sold the property at an ideal time and an ideal price” and his firm will be “reinvesting into future projects” — a lineup that includes Unicorp’s ultra-high-end The Luxe apartments at nearby O-Town West, for which he just bought the land.
Saathoff told Orlando Business Journal Westside Shoppes is “a great retail property in a prime location” and he would have liked to have held on to it longer, but for the sale price Site Centers agreed to pay. “As the saying goes, our buyer made an offer we couldn’t refuse.”
Executives for Site Centers did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The move by the retail real estate powerhouse (NYSE: SITC) seems to buck a trend where it had been divesting properties in the region. OBJ previously reported Site Centers’ 2024 sales of Lee Vista Promenade in Orlando for $69 million and Casselberry Commons in Seminole County for $40.3 million — in addition to the sale of Melbourne Shopping Center in December 2023 for $14.3 million.
Year-to-date, Site Centers Corp. was trading down 23.5% as of 2 p.m. July 9, valued at $11.47 per share. However, zooming out further reveals the company increased its value by 95.3% over the past five years.