Tesla service center, showroom to open in Lealman
By Breanne Williams
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Feb 2, 2023

Tesla is ready to open its new center in Pinellas County.

Developer Truett Realty Group has received a certificate of occupancy for the facility in Lealman. The group received the CO on Wednesday from Pinellas County, according to Rob Truett principal of Truett Realty Group, which gives Tesla the ability to open to the public. Truett said the project is “now in their hands.”

“This has been a very smooth process from start to end, and I want to commend Pinellas County for their engagement,” Truett said. “Everything was great, and I cannot commend the county’s building department enough for their extraordinary effort. This has been a great collaborative partnership between us and the county, and I hope to do much more business with them going forward.”

Truett said they worked nonstop at the end of the year to ensure the project was completed on schedule. The group purchased the 4.21-acre property in May 2022 for $13 million. It renovated the 100,000-square-foot facility — which was a former Kane’s Furniture liquidation center — into a state-of-the-art Tesla center.

The center has a showroom, service center and a massive indoor storage space. The site is in the Lealman Community Redevelopment Area, which was established in 2015. It is in unincorporated Pinellas County.

Having grown up in Pinellas County, Truett said many areas look identical now to what they were in 2004. In South Florida — where Truett is based — he said the majority of the outdated strip malls and retail centers were redeveloped, experienced significant capital investment, or redesigned to meet today’s standards and current customer needs. It’s time, Truett said, for Pinellas to reinvest in its outdated assets.

“I see a tremendous amount of opportunity in Pinellas County,” Truett said. “The fundamentals are great, and we’re certainly looking to do more in the county not only because of the success of this project but because of the incredible experience we’ve had working with the county. It has so much potential, and there’s really very minimal undeveloped land. It’s going to take creativity and thinking outside the box to execute these types of projects like we did with the Tesla Center.”

Truett said he loves doing adaptive reuse and redevelopment. He currently has a few ground-up projects in the pipeline but hopes to land on another adaptive reuse soon. He also has turned his eye toward affordable housing, which he has been looking closely at due to the ongoing housing crisis throughout Florida.

Scherer Construction was the general contractor and Thomas Engineering was the civil engineer for the project. Truett praised both teams for their work despite the rapid timeline of the project.