New Toyotas wait for inspection and installation of options at the new Southeast Toyota Distributors facility at JAXPORT's Blount Island Marine Terminal. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
Published on April 22, 2026 at 7:03 pm
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A sprawling 340,000-square-foot Southeast Toyota Distributors processing facility was on display Wednesday in the middle of a new 88-acre site at JAXPORT’s Blount Island Marine Terminal.
The $170 million facility is the result of a four-year construction project that brought 400 people to prepare and ship new Toyota and Lexus automobiles to Southeast Toyota’s 178 dealers nationwide. The facility replaces a smaller, aging site on Jacksonville’s Talleyrand Avenue.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis and Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters were among dozens of dignitaries who attended a ribbon-cutting of the facility, which actually began processing vehicles in October.
The facility already processes 4,000 vehicles a week. By next March, new rail lines to the facility will augment shipments to Toyota/Lexus dealers in the Southeast, said company President Brent Sergot.
“This facility has the capacity to do about 160,00 vehicles a year, and it will become our biggest processing facility once we have the ability accept rail beginning next spring,” Sergot said.
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Hundreds of new Toyota pickup trucks await inspection before shipment to dealerships outside of Southeast Toyota’s new facility on Blount Island. | Dan Scanlan, Jacksonville Today
JAXPORT CEO Eric Green said the facility keeps a longtime local company in Jacksonville.
“You are talking about a Florida company that’s been here in Jacksonville for well over 50 years, so JAXPORT has enjoyed a long partnership with this company,” Green said. “With the participation with the state of Florida as well as ourselves and the investment they made, we were able to keep them here. … The way they build their facilities, the way they treat their employees, the relationship they have with us — it was just vital that we do the right thing, we do the right thing, and we continue to keep them here.”
The Florida Department of Transportation provided a $19.78 million grant to assist with terminal development.
Southeast Toyota background
Southeast Toyota, one of the port’s longest-standing tenants, was established in 1968 when late owner Jim Moran partnered with Toyota Motor Sales to help expand the automaker’s presence in the U.S. market. The new Blount Island operation is Southeast Toyota’s only port facility.
The company also has a 250-acre site in the Westlake Industrial Park on Pritchard Road in northwest Jacksonville that handles over 150,000 vehicles shipped in annually by rail. And it has a 350,000 square-foot processing facility in Commerce, Georgia, where 95,000 more vehicles are shipped in for processing for distribution to dealers in Northern Alabama, the Carolinas and Northern Georgia.
Southeast Toyota began relocating last year to the current 88-acre property at Blount Island from a 50-acre facility at JAXPORT’s Talleyrand Marine Terminal, with a separate vehicle staging area on 23 acres across the road.
Ray Natour, vice president of vehicle processing and logistics for Southeast Toyota Distributors, said its new home has a higher capacity to handle more product shipment by sea now, with new rail shipments starting in less than a year, which could not be done at Talleyrand.
“It was 130,0000-square-foot smaller — they were just getting vessels from Japan, Europe and Mexico,” Sergot said. “Those same ships are coming here as well, so we have a bigger facility.”
Southeast Toyota officials said another reason they decided to expand operations on Blount Island instead of moving to another port like Brunswick, Georgia, is because 95% of the workforce is hired locally.
Also, Talleyrand could handle only seven or eight ships of new vehicles a month, meaning downtime for employees. The new Blount Island site and its daily railroad shipments mean “a constant flow of vehicle arrivals” for constant work, Ray said.
From the start, efficiency improved 8% improvement, and the speed to deliver to dealers improved, he said. The company can do 200 more cars per day than at Talleyrand. Eventually, Southeast Toyota expects to track close to 400 more.
Southeast Toyota’s former facility on Talleyrand Avenue also has a new tenant. Enstructure signed a 30-year agreement with JAXPORT to lease adjacent to its existing 35-acre site to process Mazdas imported from Mexico and Japan for distribution the Southeast.
