Developer Craig Ustler on what's next for downtown Orlando's Creative Village
By Cindy Barth
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jul 27, 2022

Orlando Business Journal Editor Cindy Barth recently spoke with downtown developer Craig Ustler, president of Orlando-based Ustler Development Inc. His company is well-known for spearheading the development of downtown's $1.5 billion Creative Village Project, which opened in 2017 and debuted its UCF Downtown campus in 2019.

Sponsored by TECO Peoples Gas, the audio series features candid conversations with top business leaders from the Orlando, South Florida, Tampa Bay and Jacksonville regions.

Below is a brief excerpt of the interview with Ustler, edited for brevity:

You’ve been involved in some of the most high-profile projects around town. What drives your interest in downtown development? I'm a hometown guy focused on making my hometown better. I'm geographically focused, whereas most developers are product-type focused. Throughout my career, I’ve been interested in what I could do for downtown Orlando and the in-town neighborhoods, where I grew up. And then I'm an urban person, so I like cities, I like walkability, I like mixed use, I like the type of projects we work on. The interesting part of real estate development might be the deal structure or whatever, or they might like certain properties. I like urban development and urban redevelopment and all the complexity that goes with that.

One of your most high-profile deals at downtown’s Creative Village was landing the office for EA Tiburon, which just opened this past year. How were you able to get them to move from Maitland into the downtown core? Getting Electronic Arts downtown was a great team effort where the city was really involved and a good partner. They're the ideal anchor for Creative Village. It was a corporate deal in the sense that we responded to an RFP and worked through the process. There were a couple of tidbits that were good to know behind the scenes. You hear it all the time [from companies about] access to talent and where can you be the most plugged in to that. That goes all the way back to the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy with EA and the graduate program at UCF. That's valuable to them. Being able to plug into that talent specifically is meaningful, and the adjacency to UCF in their graduate game design program was very pertinent.

In the last couple of years, you also picked up three additional parcels that are about 3 acres near the Bob Carr Theater. What are the potential plans that you have for that space? We're going to cut the ribbon on Luminary Green, the city park, and will have completed what we consider Creative Village Phase 1. So it's like, what do you do next? At a high level, the next phase we need to do is new office. We need office space that can accommodate complementary digital media and tech tenants that also want to be part of Creative Village. And we need to do the next apartment project. We also need another hotel downtown. So that's the private development just adjacent the Bob Carr. We're working with the city on how to adaptively reuse the Bob Carr in a way that's consistent with the Creative Village mission.