Lakewood Ranch among bidders for Amazon headquarters

Could Lakewood Ranch be home to Amazon’s future headquarters?

That’s a multi-billion dollar question being asked by the Bradenton Area Economic Development Corp.

The EDC today announced it has submitted an application to the online retail giant pitching two potential sites in Manatee County — one in North Manatee owned by developer Carlos Beruff and another in Lakewood Ranch, home to the area pitched as Collaboration Opportunities for Research and Exploration (CORE).

It’s roughly located at the northeast corner of State Road 70 and Lakewood Ranch Boulevard.

Amazon has not indicated when a site will be selected, just sometime in 2018.

Sharon Hillstrom, president and CEO of the Bradenton Area EDC, admitted the odds of being selected might be slim, but when the EDC’s director of global business development, Max Stewart, approached her about submitting a proposal for Manatee County, they began looking for sites.

“We meet most of these criteria,” Hillstrom said of Amazon’s requirements. “We’re competing with some big metro areas. From our perspective, there was no downside. Let’s just say we got on the list of (final) 10 — how great would that be?”

Amazon requires at least 100 acres for the project and expects to invest more than $5 billion in construction and grow its second headquarters to include as many as 50,000 jobs. The company’s website says it will equal its current campus in Seattle.

Hillstrom said the EDC does not promote one site over the other, but simply puts options available in Manatee County forward for consideration.

Beruff’s bid, officially submitted Monday to Amazon’s original Seattle headquarters, proposes a site of 935 acres in north Manatee County, on the Manatee-Hillsborough County line, just off Interstate 75. Beruff, founder of Medallion Home, bought the land for about $5 million in 2013.

“We can build a city for them here,” Beruff said. “They will have a blank palette.”

A team of Medallion employees, along with Atluru and LRK, put together a 93-page glossy and colorful book, filled with data, anecdotes and letters of support for its HQ2 application. Beruff calls the book “Hollywood, not mom-and-pop,” but with real data. It took about five weeks and $45,000 to create the book, says Beruff, and that doesn’t include hours taken off other projects at the $70 million homebuilder, founded in 1984.