Ask a longtime Neptune Beach resident what's happening to the old Kmart lot on Atlantic Boulevard and you'll get a shrug. Ten years empty, a few developer names that came and went, nothing to show for it. Ask the same person about the Seahorse Oceanfront Inn and Lemon Bar and you'll get the opposite reaction: Shad Khan bought it, big things are coming, just a matter of time.
The paperwork tells a different story. As of this month, the Kmart site has an actual proposal in front of the city, with a board hearing already held and two more decision points on the calendar before winter. The Seahorse and Lemon Bar, three years after the Jaguars owner's investment group closed on the purchase, still have no redevelopment plan filed with the city at all. The corner everyone wrote off is the one moving. The corner everyone assumes is already in motion is the one still waiting on a plan.
What Actually Happened at 500 Atlantic Boulevard This Month
The Kmart on Atlantic Boulevard opened in 1970 and closed in 2016 after 46 years, one of the last locations standing in North Florida when the chain's parent company began its nationwide liquidations. The site has been owned by New York-based TLM Realty Corp since 1983, when the company paid $5.15 million for it, and TLM has cycled through failed concepts ever since. A 2017 proposal from TriBridge Residential for 313 apartment units met enough neighborhood pushback over traffic that the Neptune Beach City Council voted it down 6-0 in August 2018. A follow-up concept called Saltwater Row, pitched around a boutique hotel and ground-floor retail, generated press releases and preleasing talk through Franklin Street Real Estate Services but never broke ground.
The current proposal is called Town Center West, and it went before the Neptune Beach Community Development Board on September 9, 2026, as part of a Development Order review, a required step before the city can issue construction permits. The plan calls for a three-story, 150-room hotel and roughly 90,000 square feet of retail split into two sections, one on the north side of the parcel and one on the south. Community Development Director Heather Whitmore flagged parking as the first real sticking point: the site needs 463 spaces under city standards, and between the two retail buildings and 100 spaces borrowed from the neighboring Publix, developers are currently sitting around 400.
Carmi Canipe Soares, who owns Belmarmi next door to the site, put the neighborhood's patience plainly: "It's time. We need something." The board is scheduled to take the plan up again in October, with a possible City Council vote following in November. None of that guarantees Town Center West gets built. It does mean the parcel has moved further through the city's process in the last few months than it has in the previous eight years combined.
Meanwhile, half the old shopping center never actually sat idle. The portion of the property fronting Atlantic Boulevard now anchors a Publix and a Bealls Outlet, the result of earlier TLM commercial updates, and a Lucky's Market briefly occupied part of that same footprint before closing in 2020. So the lot residents call "the empty Kmart" has actually been a mix of active retail and a vacant big box for years, which is part of why the new proposal reads less like reinventing the corner and more like finally finishing a job that stalled out twice.
Why the Lemon Bar Talk Has Outlasted Any Actual Filing
Shad Khan's Iguana Investments Florida LLC closed on the purchase of the Seahorse Oceanfront Inn and Lemon Bar in August 2023 for $36.95 million, marking Khan's first development outside downtown Jacksonville. The sale generated the kind of coverage that sticks in a neighborhood's memory: talk of a private beach club, a spa, a fitness center, an upgraded Lemon Bar, and new retail, all under the banner of a boutique resort hotel.
Here's what hasn't happened since. According to a May 2025 update from News4JAX, documents obtained from the city showed potential concepts for the site, but no final redevelopment plans had been submitted to Neptune Beach at that point, and Iguana Investments confirmed as much directly, stating that the properties were being operated as-is with capital improvements underway in the hotel rooms and at the bar, managed day to day by Remington Hospitality. The most concrete, documented change to the property since the purchase closed has been smaller than the vision suggested: upgraded parking behind the hotel and the ability to pay by credit card instead of cash only.
That gap between announcement and filing matters if you live near either site, because it means the rumor mill has been running for three years on a deal that hasn't reached the point of city review, while the site everyone assumed was frozen just cleared its first real hurdle.
| Kmart site, 500 Atlantic Blvd | Seahorse Inn / Lemon Bar | |
|---|---|---|
| Current owner since | 1983 (TLM Realty Corp) | 2023 (Iguana Investments Florida LLC) |
| Vacant or unresolved since | 2016, when Kmart closed | Operating continuously |
| Formal plan filed with city? | Yes, Development Order review held September 9, 2026 | Not as of the most recent city update |
| Next scheduled step | Board review in October, possible Council vote in November | None scheduled |
What's Already Changed While the Big Two Sat in Limbo
While the two headline sites worked through very different timelines, smaller, already-finished changes have been reshaping the same stretch of Beaches corridor.
Right next door in Atlantic Beach, the former One Ocean Resort & Spa completed its rebrand into Dune House Hotel & Spa, with renovations wrapped by spring 2026 under a "barefoot luxury" concept. Inside it, Coastal Farmer has replaced Azurea, long considered one of the more romantic dinner spots in the area. The new restaurant, led by executive chef Daniel Tederous and chef de cuisine Nicolas Kes, sources from a named list of regional partners including Congaree and Penn, Black Hog Farm, Down to Earth Farm, County Line Produce, Berry Good Farms, Safe Harbor Seafood, and Mayport C&C Fisheries. Enough diners describe it as being in Neptune Beach that the line between the two towns feels more like a formality than a fact at this particular address.
A few blocks over, Jarboe Park has its own recent, finished chapter. In July 2025 the city dedicated the park's baseball field as Eddie Bounds Field, honoring an officer who served the Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach police departments for 42 years before his death from COVID-19 complications in 2021. The same year, the city also named the stretch of Seagate Avenue between A1A and Penman Road as Officer Paul Eddie Bounds-Legacy Lane. It's a small, permanent piece of the neighborhood's identity that didn't wait on any developer's timeline.
Further out, the Penman Road Complete Streets project, funded by the City of Jacksonville and coordinated with Neptune Beach, is converting several intersections along the corridor to roundabouts, including the Florida Boulevard five-way intersection. As of the most recent project briefing, design work sat at roughly 30 percent complete, with the design phase targeted to finish sometime in 2026 and construction potentially starting in 2027. And on the retail side, a Tropical Smoothie Cafe is on the way to 628 Atlantic Boulevard, according to plan review documents filed with the city, joining the steady turnover of small storefronts that keeps happening regardless of what's decided at 500 Atlantic or at the Seahorse.
The Corner to Actually Watch
None of this means Town Center West is a sure thing. Plenty of proposals for that parcel have looked promising at the board level and died before a shovel hit the ground. But if you live near Atlantic Boulevard and want to know where change is genuinely closest to arriving, the paper trail points to the old Kmart lot before it points to the beachfront hotel everyone assumes is already in motion. The Community Development Board's October session and a possible November Council vote are both public meetings, and residents who want a say in what fills those 17 acres have a real, near-term window to show up.
The Lemon Bar isn't going anywhere soon, and neither is the uncertainty around it. For now, the more interesting document to track is the one with an actual filing date.
If you're weighing what any of this could mean for property values along the Atlantic Boulevard corridor or anywhere else in Neptune Beach, Sharon Mills has spent nearly two decades tracking exactly this kind of neighborhood detail. Reach out for a conversation, no pressure, just a local read on what's real and what's still just talk.
