Willis Lease Finance Corporation, a publicly traded lessor of commercial aircraft engines and aviation equipment founded in 1985, has agreed to pay $118 million for Cocomar Business Park, a three-building, roughly 375,000-square-foot campus under construction in Coconut Creek, Florida, according to a securities filing disclosing the deal. CEO Austin Willis, part of the founding Willis family that still leads the company alongside Executive Chairman Charles F. Willis IV, represented the company in the transaction. The purchase, working out to about $315 per square foot, covers a 35-acre site at 4733, 4763 and 4851 West Atlantic Boulevard, purchased from an affiliate of Charleston, South Carolina-based developer Greystar, which bought the underlying land for $30.5 million just last year before developing it as spec industrial space. The building includes 32-foot ceilings, 78 dock doors and 313 parking spaces, specifications suited to industrial and logistics use rather than a typical corporate office campus.
That’s an important detail, because Willis Lease Finance isn’t a company moving its headquarters into Florida from somewhere else. The company already owns its current 60,000-square-foot headquarters in Coconut Creek, at 4700 Lyons Technology Parkway, purchased for $4.5 million in 2017, and separately leases 45,000 square feet in nearby Pompano Beach and 25,000 square feet in Sunrise, putting its existing South Florida footprint at roughly 130,000 square feet spread across three locations. The new campus, at nearly three times that combined size, is designed to consolidate all of it, headquarters staff, spare parts operations, maintenance repair and overhaul services, and engine preservation and storage, into a single purpose-built facility rather than adding a new market to the company’s map. Reported completion timelines vary across sources, with estimates ranging from later this year to as far out as early 2028, but occupancy is broadly expected sometime in 2027 once construction wraps.
What’s actually driving the expansion is the physical scale of Willis Lease Finance’s underlying aviation business, not a search for a friendlier tax jurisdiction. The company owned 363 aircraft engines, 20 aircraft and a marine vessel as of the end of 2025, leased out to 69 lessees across 37 countries, a portfolio that requires real physical infrastructure to service: engines need dedicated storage and preservation space between leases, spare parts require warehousing, and maintenance and overhaul work needs heavy-duty industrial space with the ceiling heights and loading capacity a typical office building doesn’t offer. The company recently struck a new engine storage partnership with Pratt & Whitney, adding directly to the kind of physical capacity this new campus is built to support. None of that growth has anything to do with Florida’s lack of a state income tax specifically, since Willis Lease Finance has operated out of Coconut Creek for years already; the driver here is that its existing three-location footprint simply ran out of room for a business that’s been adding engines, aircraft and service contracts faster than its scattered facilities could absorb…