WE CREATE SPACES WHERE PEOPLE COME TO STAY.
Every day we challenge ourselves to exceed the expectations of our patrons, our tenants, our partners, and our investors.
Relationships form the foundation of our spaces, and our business.
What we do
We innovate, design, create, and build spaces for real life engagement
How we do it
On a solid foundation of shared values with our partners
Why we do it
To energize and engage communities to enhance their lives
OUR GOAL IS SIMPLE:
CREATE SpACES WHERE DAILY Connections CAN POSITIVELY IMPACT EACH AND EVERY PERSON DRAWN to our Centers
OUR HISTORY
We take pride in our company's history and our continuous evolution.
For over 40 years, we have built a foundation based on an intellectual curiosity that has consistently led us to gain valuable experience and real estate industry expertise.
Center Connect Development (Center Connect) is a young company, born in 2019. However, the founders spun out of Bissett, McGrath Properties, Inc. (BMP), a real estate brokerage and investment company with more than four decades of experience in the Tampa Bay Market.
BMP’S HISTORY IS THE HISTORY OF DEVELOPMENT IN TAMPA BAY.
Will Bissett and Edd McGrath started assembling properties for developers in the early 1970s and joined forces in 1979 to offer investment expertise and real estate services to both single-family and commercial developers. Together they developed some of the largest real estate projects in the Tampa area, including FishHawk Ranch (7,000+ acre Master Planned Community) in Lithia, FL and Carillon Park (400+ acres Corporate Park) in St. Petersburg, FL.
Courtney Bissett-Hayes joined Will and Edd in 2001 to focus on tenant management and leasing. Before joining BMP, she was in charge of Specialty Retail for the Rouse Company in Tampa, and responsible for tenant leasing and the management of a $1 M+ annual budget. She was also a founding development team member of the Oviedo Market Place, in Orlando, FL. The Oviedo Market Place was a ground-up regional shopping center merging the traditional retail shopping center with an outdoor marketplace. Courtney started developing neighborhood retail centers as an Owner’s Representative in 2001, completing the development and leasing of the Bay-to-Bay Center (32,000 square feet) in South Tampa. In 2017, she started the development of a 10-acre BMP investment project in Brandon, FL. This project includes a hotel and 28,000 square feet of experiential retail. Courtney has primary responsibility for the leasing and management of this property as well as another BMP investment property. Both properties are 100% leased.
Paul Bissett joined BMP in 2019 after 20 years of founding and exiting technology start-ups. Before that, Paul worked on Wall Street as a bond trader and quantitative analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.; this was followed by the completion of a Ph.D. in oceanographic computer sciences developing massively parallel computing solutions for the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation. Paul joined BMP to focus on a developing a real estate product for daily, real-life engagement.
Paul and Courtney, under Will’s guidance and expertise, formed Center Connect Development (Center Connect), a company devoted to bringing urban lifestyle experiences into suburban markets.