😃 🫠 Condo Boom, Office Gloom?

Happy Friday Highest & Best! Today we swim through a sea of luxury condo proposals and ask whether Miami’s office market is getting choppy. Here’s the playlist:

🏗️ Rock n Roll and Empty Nester condos coming soon.

🥶 Miami office market cool-off?

💰 A big Miami office loan, nonetheless.

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Let’s get to it!

Condos, Condos and Even More Condos!

Someone turned on the luxury condo spigot in South Florida this week. Or maybe the spring home-selling season is upon us, and it’s time to send up flares in search of buyers.

Here’s a list of new South Florida condo projects that announced themselves in recent days:

• 🎸 Rock ‘N’ Roll Condos: The Rider at Wynwood is pitching itself as the wealthy nomad’s dream. It will have 146 units, fully furnished, that you may buy and choose to never live in. The Miami rock-themed project allows condo owners to rent out their units, without restrictions, on home-sharing platforms like Airbnb.
  
  Prices at the 12-story building — where owners have access to a fleet of Harley-Davidsons — start in the $600,000’s and go to over $1.8 million, according to a statement from the developer, Rilea Group. Sales start now, construction later this year, and the building’s completion is expected in 2026.

• 🍸 Empty Nester Chic: Developer PMG, which has built skyscraping towers in Miami and Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, announced its first condo project in Fort Lauderdale.
  
   Sage Intracoastal Residences will rise 18 stories and have 44 furnished units, starting at $2.9 million, the developer said. It will be built on the current site of a nearly 70-year old co-op building whose apartment owners collectively agreed to sell the property, according to Dan Kaplan, PMG’s managing partner.

The project could appeal to empty nesters seeking to sell their single-family homes but won’t— because there’s few choices for what to buy next, Kaplan said. “We think of it as a good relief valve for folks looking to downsize,” he said in an interview.

“You’re looking at folks who own homes, likely with no mortgages, that are for sure worth between two and four million,” he said of one possible buyer pool.

Sales at Sage start in April, though the project has at least six “reservations,” or nonbinding cash commitments, Kaplan said.

(For a wider view of PMG’s outlook on Florida, see our interview with CEO Kevin Maloney here).

• 🌴 Fantasy Island: Buyers with at least $4.9 million to spend on a condo can now get a peek at the plans for the Residences at Mandarin Oriental in Miami. Sales will start this spring for condos in the two-tower project, located on the island of Brickell Key, across a bridge from Miami’s financial district. The developer, Swire Properties, said this week that would-be buyers can make private appointments at a “Preview Lounge” inside the Mandarin Oriental Miami hotel.

•  💵 Plans for a Ritz-Carlton branded condo tower on the West Palm Beach waterfront are moving forward, Miami-based developer Related Group told the Palm Beach Post this week. There’s still an influx of well-heeled executives moving to the region, so Related’s gonna build something for them to buy: a 28-story tower with 144 units priced from $2.5 million to more than $6 million.

"We believe there will be a continuing demand from people moving here with high-paying jobs," Related’s CEO Jorge Pérez told the Post.

This week’s sales announcements come as the number of condos on the market is climbing throughout South Florida, per last week’s newsletter. (Read here: “High on Supply”).

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• High on Supply, March 8, 2024

• Condo Cornucopia!, March 1, 2024

• Billionaire Name Game, Feb. 23, 2024

Miami’s high-flying office market is experiencing something unusual: the pull of gravity.

• 🏢 One Brickell City Centre, a planned office tower that will be Florida’s largest, is having trouble landing an anchor tenant, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. The under-construction building, set to have 68 floors and 1.5 million square feet of office space, broke ground a year ago and is grappling with a leasing market that’s slowed down since.

   

  Corporate relocations to Miami are still happening, but not at the pace they were two years ago, brokerage CBRE said in its most recent office report. “Today, existing tenants are driving most of the market,” the firm said, which means a smaller pool of takers.

• 🏢 An office complex in Coral Gables sold at a 25% loss this week. The five-building property, called “Douglas Entrance,” was purchased for $76 million, according to sales tracker Vizzda. That price is 25% less than what the seller paid 10 years ago, when it was purchased for $100.8 million.

But Wait! This Office Tower Just Got a Major Bank Loan

An rising office tower in Miami secured a $181 million construction loan this week.

The loan, from Bank OZK — which really likes financing South Florida projects — will back the construction of 2600 Biscayne Blvd, a 41-story office and apartment building in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood, the builder said.

The tower, developed by Oak Row Equities, will have 187,000 square feet of office and retail space plus 399 luxury apartments, with amenities that include a pet spa.

Fifty percent of the available office and retail space had been leased before construction began, which, as Oak Row tells it, makes it “one of the most pre-leased new construction office buildings in Miami’s history.” 

That probably helped some in getting that loan 🤔

That’s it for today!

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