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Happy Friday Highest & Best! And welcome to the new subscribers who’ve arrived through my story in the New York Post last weekend, which I'll cite from below. Here’s the rundown for today:

🏖 West Palm Beach wins the “Covid real estate wars”
🏗 Billionaire Ken Griffin unveils Miami skyscraper plan
💸 Foot Locker leaves NYC for Florida
🤔 Florida has the most real estate agents per capita

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Let’s get to it!

The Rise (and Rise?) of West Palm Beach

Twenty-eight years too early is how developer Stephen Ross describes his firm’s arrival in West Palm Beach, the Florida city he’s now helping transform with a trio of new office towers, ultra-luxury condos, and soon, a university.

Two-plus decades ago, the mega-developer and founder of Related Cos. struggled just to lease, and re-lease, retail space in the city’s downtown amid high turnover.

“You couldn’t keep tenants because there wasn’t enough year-round business,” said Kenneth Himmel, president of Related Ross, the Florida-centric firm spun off from New York City’s Related. “Everything was fine during the winter . . . and then in the summertime, there was no one.”

What a difference a few decades — and a pandemic — make.

While Miami may grab headlines with blingy condo towers and island enclaves, the bigger urban transformation post-COVID is happening 70 miles north in West Palm Beach — a city of 124,000 that’s becoming a co-mecca for the nation’s wealth.

Well-heeled newcomers pushed Palm Beach County to the top of the pile in the national reshuffling of affluence. Between 2020 and 2021 new residents to the county (with West Palm as its seat) brought $7.03 billion in new taxable income — more than any other place in the U.S. In 2022, households moving into Palm Beach County had an average adjusted gross income of $260,100 — far higher than Miami-Dade’s $175,600, according to the Miami Association of Realtors.

These new arrivals are not just buying gated estates for leisurely weekends on the water. They’re moving their businesses and employees with them, taking up prime office space in West Palm Beach —and triggering the development of more. They’re inspiring a boomlet of new luxury condos (with Manhattan prices and pedigrees) along the city’s waterfront.

And they're luring in a university. (Hint: It’s Vanderbilt)

Fore more details, see my NY Post story: “How West Palm Beach won Covid’s Real Estate Wars.”

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• The Old College Try!, August 23, 2024

• It’s Raining Rentals!, August 9, 2024

• The Office Quarterback, August 2, 2024

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Miami: Two New Office Towers in Two Weeks

Two weeks, and two separate financial firms announce they're building new office headquarters along Miami's waterfront.

Last week, it was Banco Santander, Spain's largest bank. Santander said it intends to raze its current 14-story Miami office building and build a 41-story tower in its place.

This week, it’s billionaire Ken Griffin’s turn.

Griffin, founder of the hedge fund Citadel, unveiled plans for a skyline-altering, 54-story tower on Brickell Bay Drive, (a short walk from Santander’s future HQ). Both are in Miami’s financial district.

Griffin’s planned 1,032-foot tower — to be Citadel’s future headquarters — will include 1.3 million square feet of office space and a 212-room hotel on the top 14 floors. (The hotel ‘lobby’ will be the uppermost stories).

The office space will span the 5th through 37th floors, all of them with unobstructed views of Biscayne Bay. A 50-car garage for executives will be underground. A separate garage (for everyone else) will be built across the street, on another parcel that Griffin owns.

Griffin aims to break ground on the project in late 2025. Santander will start demolition on its site in a few weeks.

Taken together, Citadel’s and Santander’s towers would bring over 2 million square feet of new office space within blocks of each other in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood.

Class A offices in Brickell command the highest rents in Miami, with average asking rates of $99.40 per square foot in the second quarter, according to brokerage CBRE. That’s a 5.8% increase from a year earlier.

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Foot Locker is Moving to Florida. FIFA is Stretching Out

Looks like we’ve got some athletic real estate news:

👟 Foot Locker is lacing up and leaving New York. The sneaker retailer said this week that it’s moving its corporate headquarters to St. Petersburg, Florida in 2025.

The company, with a market cap of nearly $3 billion, “plans to maintain only a limited presence in New York City going forward,” according to its second quarter earnings report.

Currently in midtown Manhattan, Foot Locker isn’t mandating that its New York employees relocate, CEO Mary Dillon said in a conference call. But “we really think we'll be able to attract or retain great talent” to the Florida office, she said. 🏝

⚽ FIFA, the governing body for international soccer, is getting cozy in Miami— and stretching out. The Zurich-based soccer authority had been leasing office space in Coral Gables ahead of the 2026 World Cup (of which seven matches will be held in Miami).

And then it leased even more.

FIFA, with 350 employees in Miami, took an extra floor of an office building at 396 Alhambra Circle, Bloomberg News reported this week. And it plans to keep 100 staffers in town permanently after the World Cup, with its legal department likely relocating from Zurich.

The organization now occupies roughly 75,000 square feet of office space in the building across four floors, Bloomberg said.

FIFA’s expanded office footprint further bolsters Miami’s image as a global soccer hub, which got a boost last year when the city’s professional soccer club, Inter Miami CF, signed superstar Lionel Messi.

FIFA expects $11 billion in revenues between 2023 to 2026, the result of expanding the 2026 World Cup to include 48 teams, Bloomberg reported.

Florida is number one in the U.S.…..in its number of real estate agents.

More than three in every 1,000 workers in the Sunshine State is a real estate broker, Axios reported this week, citing data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That makes it the U.S. state with the highest share of agents, ahead of Arizona and Colorado, which held the second and third spots.

The temptation to earn commissions off Florida’s surging home values is understandable. The median price of Florida homes (statewide) climbed nearly 60% between July 2019 and July 2024, according to brokerage Redfin.

That’s it for today!

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