Arthrex is finishing a 41-unit apartment building in Naples that it will not rent to the public, because its own new hires cannot land here fast enough without it

Arthrex is finishing a 41-unit apartment building in Naples that will house its own new hires rather than go on the rental market, the Business Observer reported on Wednesday morning, in a piece by deputy managing editor Louis Llovio.

The five-storey, 80,000-square-foot building sits on a 2.06-acre parcel in the Palm River community, less than two miles from the medical device company's global headquarters, and should be complete within a couple of months. Every unit has two bedrooms, two bathrooms and 1,100 square feet.

Trent Lewis, Arthrex's senior director of facilities and corporate infrastructure, described the reasoning at the Real Estate Investment Society's monthly luncheon in Fort Myers on 11 August. The company is not moving into multifamily development, he said. It is trying to make a move to Southwest Florida survivable for people who have taken a job here and have to relocate a household to do it.

The hiring rate behind the building

Lewis told the group Arthrex has passed 13,000 employees worldwide, posts about 600 open jobs at any one time, and runs a new hire orientation class every two weeks that brings in 40 to 50 people.

The corporate housing programme that supports that predates his own arrival in 2012. Arthrex now has access to about 60 properties, from single-family homes to two and three bedroom apartments in existing complexes, and Lewis said that pool has run at about 94 per cent occupancy for the last year.

The site

The company bought the Palm River property in 2023. It then held three four-unit condominium buildings dating from 1989, which Arthrex said when the project was announced would have required cost-prohibitive renovation to bring up to code and to the standard it wanted. It chose to demolish and build new.

The parcel was originally expected to accommodate 33 units, Lewis said, and rezoning allowed the count to rise to 41. Given how tight the site is, parking went on the ground floor. The building sits between the front and back nine holes of a golf course.

Arthrex declined to say what the project cost. Lewis did not give a figure at the luncheon and a company spokesperson told the Business Observer by email that Arthrex is unable to share cost information.

The Business Observer reports that Collier County property records show the Palm River property was bought in 2023 for 5.75 million dollars, by an entity named Krisdan Management, Inc. That parcel record was not read by this desk, and the price is the Business Observer's.

Who the buyer is

The state register does confirm the ownership link. Florida's Division of Corporations records Krisdan Management, Inc. as a Delaware corporation registered in Florida on 18 April 2014, document number F14000001698, status active, with a Naples principal address. Its chairman and president is listed as Reinhold D. Schmieding, Arthrex's founder and chief executive. Erika Schmieding is listed as a vice president and Daniel Hall as assistant treasurer, vice president and registered agent.

Arthrex was founded in Munich in 1981 and moved to Naples about a decade later. Its campus there now holds corporate and manufacturing operations, a medical education centre, a conference centre and a hotel. Forbes puts the private company's estimated revenues at 3.2 billion dollars and Schmieding's stake at about 95 per cent.