Dolly Parton Plans $25 Mil Dinner Theater

ORLANDO-With tourist and hotel occupancy numbers on the low side and the general economy in the basement, Nashville, TN-based Dolly Parton Stampede Co. is placing a $25 million bet that its 14-acre, 128,000-sf, 1,200-seat dinner theater will be a hit when it opens in Orlando’s tourist corridor in November 2002.

Rebuffed last year by Orange County officials on a site at commercially dense and traffic-heavy Sand Lake and Turkey Lake Roads in south Orlando, the country singer’s company has purchased a tract at a less-congested location at 7950 Vineland Ave., off Interstate 4. The site is 10 minutes from the four million-sf Orange County Convention Center.

Terms of the land deal and the seller’s name were not disclosed. But area industrial market brokers familiar with the south Orlando submarket tell GlobeSt.com on condition of anonymity the estimated price is $7.32 million or $522,720 per acre ($12 per sf).