All right, we will begin our next presentation, so let's please give a warm welcome to the CEO of Alico, John Kiernan.
Thank you, Kendall, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. My name is John Kiernan. I'm the CEO of Alico. Alico is a publicly traded company. We're listed on the NASDAQ with the ticker ALCO. Yesterday, our market cap was about $220 million. Our stock is up about 11.8% year to date. We are an agribusiness and land management company, all located within the state of Florida. We've been in business for about 125 years. We have very strong ties to agriculture, but more importantly, to conservation and the communities in which we live and operate.
Over the last few months, we've been evolving our portfolio of land, transitioning from traditionally what has been a citrus operation to reposition the company to about 25% of our land holdings going for strategic development opportunities, balancing both the near and the long-term potential, while also basically having 75% of our land remaining into agriculture. We've been very consistent about this strategy for the last several years, where we try to provide investors with the benefits and stability of a conventional agricultural investment, combined with the optionality that comes with active land management. If a picture is worth a thousand words, we can stop right here. This is Florida. Everything in the middle is what we own, and this is where we operate.
We are in 31 different locations across eight counties, and as a diversified land company, our 53,371 acres offer what we think is long-term, near-term, and mid-term great potential. We cannot understate our legacy of conservation. Development is somewhat of a controversial topic in Florida, but our conservation pedigree goes back 125 years. What's not on this page is we've also donated close to 20,000 acres about 25 years ago to establish Florida Gulf Coast University. We have strong ties to the community in Florida. We think that translates into good, solid relationships at the federal, state, and local levels. We think this helps us as we basically create timetables on what that 25% of our land potentially could become. We also have a stable management team. Stable as far as seniority, not stable as far as any sort of.
Again, I've been with the company for about 10 years. I started out as the CFO in 2015, and in 2019, I was promoted after substantial operational experience to become the CEO. The gentleman in the middle of the page, Mitch Hutchcraft, is a leading expert in the entitlement process, all located within the state of Florida. I'll still have more credits that we're going to generate by giving up more and more areas within Collier County, but we were one of the charter members of this program, and we're actually cashing in some of these credits for this project itself. All good. The project itself, on the first side, the blue is what's going to get developed first. That's the east side. I have about 280,000 sq ft of commercial, primarily along the highway. This is Route 80 along the top here.
About 1,500 acres is going to be used for the first village. That's probably about 4,500 houses. Doors, we call it. Some of it's going to be multifamily, some will be affordable housing. There'll be 4,500 doors on the east village. Most likely, once it is approved and construction starts, we will start basically the approval process on the west village. Our strategy was we would tell everybody everything that we're planning so they get the entire big picture, because we think the picture actually is what really creates the story. Bonnet Lake, a little further north, is kind of under the radar. It's a smaller project. It's in a different county. They don't have the environmental species issue. It is going to be a master plan community. It's about 2,100 basically doors that we believe.
It's in all these different areas that you see in these pods. Won't have any commercial space, probably slightly lower price points, but a very significant project for us, and we think it will get approved prior to getting the approval on the Corkscrew one. Saddlebag , you see the picture here. We have some lakefront in the western side here. Again, not a lot of commercial. About 240 acres will be used. We'll convert all of our citrus operations, and it'll be small. It's about 840 homes. Again, it's a first step for us, and we think it'll be at very good price points because of that lakefront access. It's got some homes going up around it. This will probably have about 250 homes. Both the LaBelle project here at Plant World and this one over here at Saddlebag .
We haven't filed anything yet, so we don't have all that additional detail like we do for these that we can share with you at this time. Why we're here talking today as a public company? We have a strong track record of returning capital to shareholders. That's actually the trick. This isn't a liquidation play. This is basically how do we reward shareholders for their investment in our company. We've been paying dividends for 50 years consecutively. It's actually longer than that, 14 years longer than that. When we became public in 1960, we paid dividends, but we missed two quarters because in 1974, there was an oil embargo that drove everybody crazy, and our board got a little nervous, so we stopped two quarters. We've always been consistently paying common dividends.
We've also basically returned a whole bunch of capital, not only to shareholders, but voluntarily prepaid some debt as well as some mandatory. When I joined the firm in 2015, we had about $215 million worth of debt, which is a result of three very large transactions that merged together to form the largest citrus company in the United States. We've paid that down. We paid almost $113 million of principal payments down on our debt today. We've done a shareholder repurchase prior to what we've announced last week to the tune of almost $10 million. Again, we just announced, which is not launched yet, but because we're in a blackout period, we have to go through earnings release the second week of May.
Once we do that, we think over the next several years, we should be able to take down at least $50 million worth of stock in the open market through 10b5s. We have done a tender offer in the past as well. You add all that up, since 2015, when I joined the company, we've given back almost $190 million either through debt repayments or return of capital to shareholders. We're serious about our shareholder relationship. That's the past. What about the present? Why invest today? We streamline the business. Simplest terms, basically winding down citrus gives us tremendous flexibility to build that financial foundation. It gives the clear opportunity for shareholders to make their own evaluation of what our assets are worth because we've basically put our homework out there for you in present value terms today. It's all open property. You can drive down.
We've got an interactive map on our website, which is alicoinc.com. You can go on that map, and you can pull up every inch of property that we have. You can see what's around it, what's by it, what's near it, and you can come to your own conclusion. We are open to opportunistic land sales. We've done that in the past. When I joined the firm, in addition to all the citrus that we owned, we also owned a 69,000-acre cattle ranch, which took me two years as the CFO to figure out was losing money for us as a company and certainly wasn't returning capital. Over six or seven years, we actually disposed of that through opportunistic land sales, where the initial price to a private purchaser basically had tripled by the time we finished it in 2024.
Patience can be rewarded for land sales in Florida if you have the opportunity to stay at the table long enough. We certainly have the liquidity to stay at the table with the portfolio of assets that we have for as long as necessary. We have a really good management team that is very, very good at what they do. I have a corporate background. I have an investment banking background, but more importantly, in 10 years, I have established a real estate transaction background. Mitch Hutchcraft has spent 37 years basically in the entitlement process. He is the best in the business. You have a very good team working for you to execute the strategy on behalf of you. Last but not least, $190 million worth of capital return is nothing to turn your nose up at.
You've got some small quarterly dividends that are coming in on a common basis, but the shareholder buyback should give you some hope that we're ready to put our money where our mouth is as far as returning capital to shareholders. If you look at kind of where we think comps are trading for today, and we can talk about our comps, we think we're trading at an attractive discount. Last but not least, we've got a good, strong track record in the land management business. We've repositioned the company, and we think that creates value for shareholders while also basically remaining connected to the local communities that we've built up relationships over the last 125 years. We've given guidance over the fiscal 2025. We're just putting that up there in case you're interested about our legacy business, but there's no news here that we're releasing today.
You can come look at us as a public company with a good website. We'll talk about anything you want to do. I'll stop there. We've got a few minutes for questions. What can I tell you? Sir.
All right. That sounds very interesting. It reminded me of a little bit of St. Joe's. Are you guys related to that at all from back in the day?
Related to St. Joe? We're not related to St. Joe. We know St. Joe fairly well.
That was a huge home run.
It was. That took years to make. I think Jorge Gonzalez has done a great job. If you're unfamiliar, the question was, are we familiar with St. Joe? Is this a St. Joe kind of play? The difference is St. Joe basically has, pick a number, 15 mi worth of beach access in the Florida Panhandle, which is going to be in the northwestern corner of the state. It's going to be west of Tallahassee. We're in 31 different locations in the center of the state. We have a little more geographic diversity. They've done a great job of basically repositioning kind of their assets, which I believe historically was timber, built up a great war chest, and then went into kind of building towns. Not only towns, but they built hospitals. They helped build an airport. Watch them very carefully.
Can I ask another couple of questions?
Sure.
Board composition, just like you look at a smaller company, do you have adult supervision? Do you have a board that's creating value for you?
Sure. We have a board that has turned over a little bit, but not a lot over the last, pick a number, since 2013. We have some legacy board members through the acquisitions. Hank Slack is Chairman Emeritus for us, and he has been on boards 50 years. He is a tremendous asset. He has been a CEO. He is very active in the commodity space. He is active on boards even today. Andy Krusen, who is a board member for us as well, is extremely active in the Florida real estate development world. We have George Brokaw, who owns a good chunk of shares. He helped put the deal together with us back in 2013. He has been on corporate boards such as DISH, most likely, most recently. On the Florida side, we basically reinvented the board in 2019 with some additional members.
You have somebody like Adam Putnam, who is extremely active in politics. He was a congressman for about 10 years and then went to Tallahassee and became our Commissioner of Agriculture for eight years under Rick Scott. Since then, he's actually the CEO of Ducks Unlimited, a very powerful and well-respected conservation organization worldwide. He is now our chairman over the last couple of months. Kate English is on our board as well. She's an extremely well-respected attorney with a specialty in kind of water use and water rights, all located within Florida. Last but not least, we've got Toby Perce, who's on our board, who is basically the Chief Operating Officer for Lipman Family Farms, which is located in Florida, very, very active and powerful within the global vegetable world. He also has repositioned acres in the areas that we're talking about for real estate development.
He has walked miles in our footsteps. He's just way ahead of us and has been invaluable to us as we've looked. We feel very good about our board. We are a microcap company, but we don't think we have a microcap board.
One last question. Is there anything besides common? What's your cap structure like?
It's common.
That's it?
That's it.
No AB?
No preferred, no classes. We have a crazy structure because all of our board members are up for a vote every year. There's no staggered boards. There's no poison pills. We're as shareholder-friendly as we can possibly make it because we want to be accountable to you as our shareholders.
What kind of debt do you have?
We've got some, basically, it's a bullet term. It's a non-amortizing term with MetLife. It's going to mature. It's about $70 million. It's going to mature in 2029. They also have a very large working capital facility with us as well, all of which we announced two weeks ago. We restructured all the covenants to make them very user-friendly for us in light of this new strategy. We consider them a very, very good partner.
Thank you.
Of course.
Are you going to develop these lands? Are you going to find somebody to develop this stuff for you?
We have a question of, is Alico going to do the development work ourselves, or will we find someone to basically develop it ourselves? Million-dollar question, sir. Thank you for asking. I've been waiting for somebody to ask that question. Maybe. We don't know. The way it works down in Florida, I'm sure it works everywhere, but I'll only speak to Florida, is the entitlement is the hard part. The national real estate development firms don't really seem very interested in non-entitled basically properties because there's some risk associated with basically kind of time to market. Once a property is entitled, the rumor is people will jump you on the courthouse steps as you're walking down with your permit to put a big check in your hand to basically take that property off your hands.
That is one scenario, and we've seen several of our peers with similar properties in Collier County, which is going to be on the Lee County side for this conversation, go through that experience. We have also seen other peers basically partner with one, two, three, four, or five national developers, and there would be some sort of financial arrangement. Last but not least, we can bring in-house capabilities in to do these projects ourselves. We have not made any decision for any of the properties that we've described in those first five years on which path we're ready to go, but the first step to maintain all this optionality is to get the entitlement work done. We certainly keep in touch. For public companies, this tool includes.