Plans made for fire-damaged building on 5th Ave. S.

June 01--A Naples developer is looking to breathe new life into a fire-ravaged retail building on Fifth Avenue South.

A fire in February severely burned the two-story, five-unit building in downtown Naples, causing millions in damage and killing one man who lived there.

The property at 1074-1082 Fifth Ave. South recently sold for $1.6 million.

The new owner, going under the name JFN 1074 LLC, plans to redevelop the building, which will require approval from the Naples City Council.

Plans include a Tide Dry Cleaners and one or two other retailers in a one-story building, said Duke Kassolis, one of the property's new owners with SK Holdings Real Estate in Naples.

"The property is basically uninhabitable at this point because of the fire and the damages," he said. "So we plan to do a significant renovation of the property."

Before it burned, the building offered 14,000 square feet of commercial retail property. Tenants included an art gallery and a mattress store.

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Kassolis eyed the property before the fire, but it wasn't for sale. The new owners are also franchisees for Tide Dry Cleaners, with a territory that spans several counties in Florida, stretching from Manatee to northern Broward.

"We knew the owners, and we had been in contact with them about the property prior to the fire, and at that time they had no interest in selling, but after the fire they decided to," he said.

The seller of the property was EEP-WRS LLC.

David Stevens, a partner in Naples-based Investment Properties Corp., negotiated the sale. After the fire, Stevens said, the former owners reached out to him with interest in selling the property. Developable property in the area is scarce and expensive, so the availability of the property was fortuitous.

"It's the perfect location, given that it's accessible to the people in the old Naples area, who can get there without dealing with the traffic," Stevens said.

Downtown residents, who know their way around, will be able to get to the site without touching U.S. 41, he said.

Jim Smith, one of the former owners, said the property had been in his family for many years. The cost to restore the burned building was far more than the money his family received from insurance for the damages, he said, pointing out there are structural damages.

"The property is basically owned in some trusts for children and grandchildren, so we didn't feel it was appropriate to put them in the real estate business," Smith said. "We would have had to borrow money and that kind of thing, and it just didn't seem suitable. It's not like we're real estate developers anymore."

The new owners want to create a 6,400-square-foot building. The project is scheduled to go before the City Council on June 15.

A Tide Dry Cleaners would take up half of the renovated building, or 3,200 square feet.

Kassolis and his group, operating under the name Consolidated Cleaners Inc., owns two Tide Dry Cleaners in North Naples and Bonita Springs and recently opened one in Palm Beach County. They have six other stores in some stage of development in their franchise area, including one in Fort Myers on U.S. 41 south of Daniels Parkway.

The location on Fifth Avenue is ideal for the dry cleaners for other reasons. It's near Naples Square, a multifamily project off Goodlette-Frank Road that will offer 300 luxury condominiums, and other planned residential development, Kassolis said.

"Unlike other dry cleaners, we are looking for very convenient, very visible locations on major trafficked arteries, and so we are competing with Starbucks and Chase Bank and McDonald's and everybody else that is looking for the same kind of location," Kassolis said. "So it's very competitive to find those locations, and it takes a lot of searching to find the right locations."

Tide Dry Cleaners offers wet and dry cleaning. Almost everything is cleaned on site. The dry cleaning machines use a Green Earth system, which is gentler on clothes and the environment, and everything comes out smelling like Tide.

"Tide Dry Cleaners really represents the 21st century version of dry cleaners," Kassolis said. "We are totally green. Everything we do is really very high-tech as far as our system, and Procter & Gamble spent about $150 million developing the Tide Dry Cleaners concept."

Kassolis hopes to see the Tide store in downtown Naples open by this time next year.

At the dry cleaner's Bonita store off U.S. 41 North, a Starbucks shares its building, but Kassolis said he's not sure if that will be the setup for the Naples location.

"So far we have been received very well by people in the communities that we are serving now -- and our hope would be that the City Council would find it was consistent with the kind of high quality redevelopment they are looking for in downtown and other parts of the city," Kassolis said.

As a real estate broker, Stevens said he's often leery of dry cleaners because of the impact they can have on the environment, but not this one.

"They are not only being received from a consumer standpoint, but they are being received very well from the real estate community," he said. "People don't have to worry about them in their center being a potential risk or contaminant."

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