Lowe’s store coming to Poinciana

April 04, 2006

Already home to a 1.3 million sq. ft. Lowe’s Regional Distribution Center (RDC), Poinciana will soon be home to a new Lowe’s home improvement retail store.

Avatar Properties Inc. recently sold an 18.64-acre site to Lowe’s at the junction of Poinciana Boulevard and Pleasant Hill Road. It is the second land dealing between the two companies.

Site development for the store, which is planned to include 117,000 sq. ft. of retail sales space and more than 31,000 sq. ft. for an adjacent outdoor garden center, is scheduled to get underway shortly with an opening expected in the first quarter of 2007.

A store of this size represents an average investment of $18.5 million and creates up to 175 new jobs, according to officials of the 60-year-old Moorseville, North Carolina-based company.

A FORTUNE ® 500 company (ranked #42) with fiscal year 2005 sales of $43.2 billion, Lowe’s is the second largest home improvement retailer in the world with 185,000 employees serving more than 12 million customers a week at more than 1,225 stores in 49 states.

The do-it-yourself retailer currently operates 78 Florida home improvement centers with more than 15,000 employees, and has another 10 stores under construction throughout the state.

The company’s $73 million RDC in Poinciana, one of 11 world-class RDCs throughout the United States, opened in 2004. The size of approximately 28 football fields, it is located on a 150-acre site in Avatar’s Poinciana Office & Industrial Park which, at 1,759 acres, is the largest industrial park in Osceola County. The Lowe’s RDC in Poinciana is equipped with five miles of conveyor systems that transport more than 40,000 different items through the facility each year.

For more information about the new Lowe’s store in Poinciana, contact Jennifer Smith, Lowe’s public relations manager, at (704) 758-2298, or e-mail her at .

For more information about Avatar and Poinciana, contact Tony Iorio, Avatar vice president of land development, at (407) 933-5000, or e-mail him at .