Pallets in Seminole County: Sanford and Lake Mary

The county in three places

Roads

Interstate 4 is the spine. SR 417, the Seminole Expressway, ends at I-4 in Sanford, where it meets SR 429, and US 17-92 and SR 46 serve the town streets. These are the roads that put a Seminole County dock within reach of the airport, downtown Orlando and the Turnpike.

ZIP codes

The county pages cover 32771, 32773, 32746, 32750, 32779, 32708, 32765 and 32714.

The pallet picture

Seminole has fewer very large buildings than Orange County and more small and medium ones. That means smaller stacks, more variety of size and docks where nobody has time to sort. A request that says what the stack is, even roughly, makes a difference.

Sanford, Lake Mary and the airport district compared

The Sanford airport district

Orlando Sanford International Airport covers 3,000 acres on the edge of Sanford and has four runways. The district around it is airport logistics, wholesale and light manufacturing.

The airport

What that means for pallets

A passenger-led airport sheds fewer cargo pallets than Orlando International, which has more than 20 major freight carriers. The district's pallets come from the warehouses, wholesalers and light manufacturers nearby, in ZIP codes 32771 and 32773.

What airport-adjacent pallets look like

Pallets near an airport include those that leave on aircraft, which are often stamped for export, and those that carry airport supplies by road. A request should say which. A stamped pallet in a mixed pile is easy to lose and worth picking out, because the HT mark is what makes it usable for export freight.

Lake Mary

Lake Mary lies in northern Seminole County about 19 miles north of downtown Orlando, with I-4 along its western edge and Lake Mary Boulevard running east and west. It is more office campus than industrial park, so its pallet piles are fewer and more specific.

A corporate town

Employers in Lake Mary include AAA, Deloitte, Mitsubishi Power, Liberty Mutual, Bank of America, Verizon, JPMorgan Chase, Dixon Ticonderoga and Accesso. Dixon Ticonderoga, a manufacturer of pencils and art supplies, is headquartered there, and Accesso, a technology company serving the leisure and attractions industry, has its North American headquarters there. Most of the others are offices, so Lake Mary is not where the metro's biggest pallet piles are.

Where pallets do come from

• Warehouse distribution on the roads near I-4.
• Electronics and light assembly, where parts arrive in small, tidy loads.
• Wholesale operations that rely on regular deliveries.
• Small docks: a request from here should give the count, the size and a photograph.

ZIP code and size

Lake Mary is ZIP 32746, with a second code, 32795. A dock here is likely to have dozens of pallets rather than hundreds, and a request that says so is easier to place.

An employment centre, not a freight yard

Lake Mary saw substantial residential and commercial development in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including office, retail and industrial space, much of it along the I-4 corridor. The city covers 9.88 square miles, of which 0.80 is water. Lake Mary Boulevard is the main east-west road to I-4, and the SunRail station sits near Country Club Road, half a mile from downtown, on the same corridor that made Lake Mary a railroad settlement in the late 19th century.

Growth

Lake Mary was incorporated as a city on 7 August 1973. The 2020 census counted 16,798 residents, up from 13,822 in 2010: a gain of 2,976 people, or 21.5 percent in ten years. The city had 6,694 occupied households in 2020. For a pallet seller the numbers explain the scale: a town of this size and character has retail docks and small suppliers, not rows of distribution centres.