2025 Forecast
CONSTRUCTION
Garrett Anderson
President & Owner, Anderson Construction, Panama City
WORKFORCE: “The homebuilding workforce is in crisis mode in regard to the trades. There is lack of entry-level interest in construction coupled with an aging workforce. Average age of a skilled worker today is approximately 57. And for every four workers that leave the trades profession, one new worker enters.”
CHALLENGES: “Growth is handcuffed due to the lack of an available and knowledgeable workforce. Growth is possible and will continue in the Panhandle, but challenges remain. Major challenges include the duration of building and jurisdictional permitting, rising costs of auto insurance premiums, inflation and labor price surges.”
BRIGHT SPOTS: “Efforts by our Legislature to fund career and technical education programs. Lawmakers recently passed legislation that allows construction companies to provide part-time jobs to 16- and 17-year-old student workers on construction sites.”
CHANGES: “The biggest change in our industry is the ramped-up energy codes that have been challenging to implement and still maintain affordability.”
- MANUFACTURING
Tim McDonald
CEO, Fort Walton Machining, Fort Walton Beach
WORKFORCE: “Workforce and hiring needs were pretty bad a year ago, but now I feel it’s getting better. There’s not a lot of education for the trade of machining in the Panhandle, so I work a lot with the Okaloosa County School District and Northwest Florida State College to try to bring more awareness to this industry.”
GROWTH MODE? “There was a little bit of contraction in our business last year, but despite that we’re expecting some pretty good growth in 2025, maybe between 5-7%. I think we’ll see a lot of growth in the commercial aerospace sector. I’m very excited about 2025.”
CHANGES: “The biggest change I’ve seen over the past 10-15 years is the rapid change in this new generation of younger machinists who have grown up with computers and are able to come up with solutions to challenges that some of the older generations of machinists could not solve because they’re just not programmed that way. So, we’re seeing a generational change that’s almost existential to our industry.”
- HOSPITALITY
Julian MacQueen
Chairman and Founder, Innisfree Hotels, Gulf Breeze
WORKFORCE: “Our challenges related to our workforce hiring needs include transportation, childcare and beach locations. To address this need we are employing rideshare models that reward drivers and, at the same time, bring down transportation costs for our staff.”
CHALLENGES: “We are in our third year of reduced revenue due to the market’s resistance to room rates. Therefore, we have to make revenues through lower rates and increased occupancy. This creates a bad combination requiring us to cut back on our growth. This will be the first year we have not either built or purchased a hotel in the last 15 years.
“Since 2021, our best year ever, we have seen successively lower-demand years as all these other options for travel destinations have opened back up. The good news is we are seeing normalization coming into play in 2025, complemented by interest rate easing.”
CHANGES: “The biggest change is in the cost of construction and inflation on cost of goods. We have the land for new developments, but we can’t make the numbers work and get the returns we have historically expected. Our medium-size company has $750 million in projects sitting on a shelf.”
- PEO/STAFFING
Britt Landrum
President and CEO, LandrumHR, Pensacola
GROWTH MODE? “Our Texas, California, Colorado, Georgia and Washington, D.C., markets have been expanding. We are also growing in our home base of Northwest Florida and in the Panama City area.”
WORKFORCE: “Employers are far more hesitant to hire right now due to current economic conditions. Also, we saw job hopping decline in 2024. Although some employers are requiring their employees to return to the office full-time, there are also many that still offer work-from-home schedules. We have a longstanding tradition of working closely with the colleges and universities in the communities we serve across the country to devise strategies for talent pool development.”
CHANGES: “By far, the biggest change within our industry is the number of private equity firms that have entered into the space.”
Business Briefs
BAY
- Construction is underway on a 100,000-sq.-ft. maintenance, repair and overhaul facility at Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport. The $107-million, multibuilding project is being partially funded by a $25-million grant from Triumph Gulf Coast. The project, which will be owned and largely financed by Space Florida, is expected to create some 500 jobs.
CALHOUN
- The new Calhoun/Liberty Hospital will open this summer. The 50,000-sq.-ft. facility, the first of a multistage development plan, includes an emergency room and eight private inpatient rooms. Plans are underway to secure funding for additional inpatient rooms and outpatient services.
DIXIE
- The Dixie County School District is transitioning the majority of its school buses to fully electric powered. The move replaces 23 diesel-powered buses and was financed through a grant from the North Florida Economic Development Partnership. The buses have a fully charged range of 120 miles.
ESCAMBIA
- Ascension Sacred Heart is moving forward with plans for a $30-million inpatient rehabilitation facility on its Pensacola campus. The 41,000-sq.-ft. rehab facility will be located in the former Children’s Medical Services Building. Will Condon, Ascension Sacred Heart president and CEO, says the three-story building will be retrofitted to house the rehab center expected to open in July 2026.
GADSDEN
- A newly installed 7-megawatt solar farm in Gadsden County is powering 1,400 Talquin Electric Cooperative customers. The solar plant is one of three new clean power generating facilities in Northwest Florida. Two other large solar plants recently have been built in Liberty County and Wakulla County.
HOLMES
- The Busy Bee Travel Plaza has opened in Bonifay. The Florida-based convenience store chain is offering customers Tesla charging stations, a large retail shopping area and overnight truck parking.
JACKSON
- Construction is underway on a hangar and other airport improvement projects at the City of Marianna’s Municipal Airport. The centerpiece of the $3-million project is a 12,000-sq.-ft. corporate aircraft hangar and 3,000 square feet of office space. The project was funded with a FDOT Aviation Program grant.
LEON
- Job creation at Amazon’s robotic fulfillment center in Tallahassee has far exceeded its initial goal of 1,000 positions. Opened in 2023, the $200-million, 630,000-sq.-ft. facility now has 2,000 employees with an additional 300 workers at its delivery stations. The fulfillment center is the largest single private sector capital project in Leon County history.
OKALOOSA
- Central Moloney, maker of large electric transformers, has begun construction of a manufacturing facility at the Shoal River Ranch industrial park in Okaloosa County. The plant is on track for completion in 2026. The Okaloosa County Commission recently approved purchase of 229 acres along the Shoal River for $850,000 to provide more public access recreational opportunities.
SANTA ROSA
- Construction is underway on Santa Rosa County’s Milton Interchange Park. The industrial park project is expected to be completed in early summer of 2026. The park already has lined up its first tenant, food distributor Cheney Brothers, with plans to build a 350,000-sq.-ft. warehouse storage facility on a 50-acre site.
TAYLOR
- Taylor County’s Big Bend Technical College is using a $5-million state grant to build a 10,000-sq.-ft. advanced manufacturing teaching facility. The state grant is designed to help the city of Perry rebound from the abrupt closure of the Foley cellulose mill in 2023. The closure resulted in the loss of nearly 350 direct jobs.
WALTON
Construction of a $50-million Emerald Coast Logistics Center is underway at the Mossy Head industrial park in Walton County. The 34-acre site will host five warehouse-style buildings totaling more than 500,000 square feet. The builder is Alabama-based Leaf River Group. The site is designed to accommodate several different industries, including construction and building supplies, food and beverage services, third-party logistics, last-mile distributors, and the aerospace and avionics industries, says Leaf River spokesman Stewart Speed.
Manufacturing 2.0
The standout emerging sector within Northwest Florida’s robust economy is advanced manufacturing.
Firms that assemble wind turbines, make precision machined parts for aircraft and build high-value ships for the Defense Department are major contributors in this $3-billion sector that employs 8,000 direct jobs, says Jennifer Conoley, President and CEO of Florida’s Great Northwest.
“Advanced manufacturing industries in aerospace, renewable energy, marine transportation and electrical components are expanding in Northwest Florida and remain a target focus for our regional economic development efforts.”
One of the largest and most prominent advanced manufacturers in the Panhandle region is GE Vernova. The Pensacola-based plant is in the midst of a multibillion-dollar contract to manufacture 647 wind turbines for the SunZia Wind Project in New Mexico expected to go fully online in 2026.
The Pensacola plant employs some 600 workers and is handling the bulk of SunZia turbine assemblies for GE Vernova.
Upon completion, SunZia will be the largest wind power generating project ever constructed in the Western Hemisphere.
Mixed-Use Project Coming to Beulah
Escambia County commissioners are considering three offers to develop the 540-acre site known as Navy Outlying Field 8, located immediately adjacent to the 320-acre Navy Federal Credit Union campus. A development company called Beulah Town Center is offering $42.5 million for the property, Beulah Ranch is offering $30 million, and Tri-W Development, working with former Pensacola mayor and real estate developer Ashton Hayward, is offering $40 million. Zoning for the site calls for a mix of commercial, residential and light industrial development, and a town center with shops and restaurants within walking distance.
On a Roll
Panhandle Power Solutions is on a winning streak, recently securing major contracts with NASA and other large military bases throughout Florida for installation of electrical transmission and distribution lines.
The Destin-based company is a subsidiary of Bristol Bay Native Corp., whose shareholders are the indigenous people of the Bristol Bay Region of Alaska.
PPS’s most recent contract with NASA calls for laying 4.5 miles of both overhead and underground primary electrical distribution lines at NASA’s launch complex for government and commercial space access in Brevard County.
The installation project is underway and is expected to be completed in the fall of 2025.
This latest NASA contract is one of several PPS has won recently, including installation of electrical distribution upgrades and other power replacement projects at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and Patrick Space Force Base in Cocca Beach.
The company also recently partnered with Florida-based NextEra on a 7-megawatt solar plant installation at a site along the New York-Vermont border that was completed in 2024.