by Retailer has opened the 1st of 4 stores planned for the area in the next 2 years
PLANT CITY, Fla. — HNN 125 retailer City Furniture is opening its first store here, part of a four-phase expansion in the Tampa metro area that will continue through the end of 2024.
The company has unveiled its 1.3-million-square-foot complex in Plant City, roughly a half-hour east of Tampa and about 15 minutes west of Lakeland along Interstate 4.
Located on about 110 acres, the sprawling complex has about 1.1 million square feet of warehouse space, a 160,000-square-foot showroom and a 25,000-square-foot “Scratch and Dent” clearance center, plus some administrative offices.
The store had a soft opening the weekend before Black Friday and will have a grand opening on Dec. 2.
While not revealing the specific dollar investment for the facility — which City built from the ground up — the store will tap into a growing metropolitan area with about 4.3 million people, Chairman Keith Koenig told Home News Now.
“It’s the next logical expansion area for us,” he said. “It’s as hot a market as there is, and the long-term housing growth is very strong, the city is well run and it is a little bit more affordable than South Florida. Percentagewise, there is a lot of population growth over the next number of years.”
He added that having a warehouse also makes sense because of its location near the coast and along a major interstate highway.
“We added a really big warehouse because our warehouse capacity is stretched to the max right now in Fort Lauderdale, Orlando and what we have in Miami,” Koenig said. “We needed to build long-term capacity for storage so this was the first logical place and the locations we are taking are very prime.”
Of the Plant City store, he said, “Folks are able to get there quickly and it is a really good site for us.”
Koenig said the next store will open in 14-15 months, with the other two opening by this time in 2024. Positioned within a 30- to 40-minute drive from each other, the stores will be accessible to a large number of area residents.
“They are all freeway located, with quick and easy access and they are all going to be very big stores,” Koenig said, adding they all will offer similar product and services such as in-stock availability and quick delivery “with good prices and a big assortment. People like selection.”
“We also are staying with vendors that have brought us to the dance. We have a great supply chain and great vendors, so we are going to grow with them.”
Andrew Koenig, chief executive officer, said the facility is among the larger stores in the Tamarac, Florida-based company’s network of 35 City Furniture and Ashley HomeStore locations as of late 2021. He said that when the company started branding itself City Furniture in 1994, its stores were between 50,000 and 60,000 square feet, eventually growing to about 120,000 square feet and larger, including the current store footprint in the Tampa area.
“We have been evolving our business for several years into larger store footprints,” he said.
He also noted that it makes sense to expand into Tampa because of the strength of its population and demographics.
“Tampa happens to be a hot market in the U.S.,” he said, adding that it also helps with logistics because of its proximity to a major port on the west coast of Florida. “It helps us diversify our supply chain into the state of Florida.”
Another major plus?
“The people here also are really nice,” he said.
