A Southside Asset Changes Hands — With a Telling Buyer Behind It

Another major Southside office building has officially come off the books. On Nov. 10, PNC Bank sold its five-story office building at 10060 Skinner Lake Drive for $6.5 million to Sage Development Group, a Panama City Beach-based company best known for building assisted and independent living communities across the Southeast.

The sale itself is significant, not just because of the price tag or the location, but because of who bought it. Sage is not a speculative office investor, nor a corporate consolidator looking to bring jobs to Southside. They build senior living communities — and they build them at scale. Their projects typically run from 51 to nearly 200 units in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Virginia. When a company like that buys an aging office building in the heart of Jacksonville’s primary suburban office corridor, it’s not hard to see where the conversation is heading.

Jacksonville’s Office Market: A Place Where Reality Is Catching Up to Optimism

For the last three years, Jacksonville’s office vacancy rate has quietly — and steadily — crept upward. Depending on which dataset you follow, the metro is sitting somewhere between 17% and 20% vacant, and that’s before counting sublease shadow space. The Southside and Deerwood Park submarkets are feeling it the most. These areas thrived during the 1990s and 2000s corporate-campus era, but the pandemic-era shift to hybrid work has left many buildings aging out of modern tenant expectations.

Owners who once expected full floors of corporate tenants are suddenly confronting a different equation: retrofit, repurpose, or watch value drain away.

Against that backdrop, Sage Development Group’s acquisition looks less like an outlier and more like a preview of what’s coming.

Why Senior Living Makes Sense Here

If Sage does pursue a conversion — and again, no plans have been publicly announced — the location checks nearly every box senior living developers look for.

Healthcare access: Mayo Clinic, Baptist South, Memorial, and St. Vincent’s are all within easy reach. Senior living operators increasingly cluster near medical hubs for obvious reasons: collaboration, convenience, and access to specialized care.

Retail and services: The Gate/JTB corridor is saturated with restaurants, pharmacies, grocery stores, and entertainment options. Independent living residents benefit from the autonomy and activity these areas offer.

Demographic alignment: Southside continues to attract relocating retirees and adult children who want quality housing options for aging parents close to where they work.

This isn’t a speculative corridor. It’s one of Jacksonville’s most in-demand suburban zones — exactly the type of environment that supports a successful assisted and independent living community.

Adaptive Reuse: Jacksonville’s Next Big Development Frontier

For years, talk of converting office space into residential or senior living remained mostly hypothetical in Jacksonville. Office rents were stable, corporate relocations were growing, and developers focused on greenfield construction instead of wrestling with complicated adaptive reuse projects.

Today, conditions have changed. Office vacancies are high. Borrowing costs remain stubborn. And yet Jacksonville’s population — especially its 55+ segment — is still expanding at one of the fastest rates in the Southeast.

That creates the conditions for adaptive reuse to finally take hold.

The former PNC building presents a textbook opportunity: a five-story structure with sizable floor plates, abundant parking, and a central location. Reconfiguring office floors into residential units requires significant interior demolition, life-safety upgrades, accessibility retrofits, and careful design. But the framework is workable — and more importantly, financially viable in a way conventional office leasing may no longer be.

If converted, the building could realistically support somewhere between 80 and 150 units depending on layout, mix, and amenity allocation.

The Bigger Picture: What This Signals for Jacksonville’s Future

This sale fits a broader trend we’ve been tracking: aging office assets being repositioned into uses that actually match where Jacksonville’s economy and demographics are heading.

A senior living community would bring a different kind of activation to the Gate Parkway corridor — medical, hospitality, daily family visitation, and a steady workforce. It would also prevent yet another suburban office building from slipping into long-term vacancy, a scenario already unfolding in multiple pockets of Southside.

What’s more interesting is what this means for other properties. If Sage proves the model works at this site, there will be no shortage of candidates. The city is full of office buildings nearing functional obsolescence, and the market forces nudging owners toward alternative uses are only gaining strength.

The acquisition of the former PNC building may end up marking a turning point: the moment when Jacksonville’s suburban office market began shifting toward a new identity — one where medical, residential, and senior living uses replace vacant cubes and half-empty parking lots.

For now, the building sits quietly on Skinner Lake Drive. But the writing on the wall is clear: in a market where office vacancies keep rising and senior housing demand keeps intensifying, this property’s next life may be far more active than its last.