💼 Out of Office?

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Happy Friday Highest & Best! Here’s a rundown of news from the South Florida real estate week that was:

🏗️ Ross Goes Big on West Palm Office Towers

💸 Is Now the Time to Cash Out of Miami Offices?

🌇 Unbuilt Condo Sets a St. Pete Price Record

🏚️ $165 Million Miami Beach Teardown?

Let’s get to it!

Who Builds Offices in 2025? Stephen Ross Does

Office tower construction has fallen out of fashion in much of the country, but Stephen Ross is still pouring concrete in West Palm Beach.

💰 The developer’s firm, Related Ross, is close to landing a roughly $700 million debt package to finance two new office towers in Downtown West Palm, the Commercial Observer reported. Ares Management and Monarch Alternative Capital are expected to provide the financing.

📈 If the deal closes, it would push Ross’s total construction debt in West Palm Beach to over $1 billion—just weeks after he secured $600 million to fund a luxury waterfront condo nearby.

🚧 The funding will go toward 15 and 10 CityPlace, a pair of towers already under construction. The 26-story 15 CityPlace will include 500,000 square feet of office and 20,000 square feet of retail; 10 CityPlace will add another 480,000 square feet. Cleveland Clinic has pre-leased 125,000 square feet in the larger building.

🌴 Unlike most U.S. cities, where pitching a new office building would be met with polite laughter or blank stares, West Palm Beach is on an office kick. Nearly the entire office pipeline in Palm Beach County—about 1 million square feet—is centered in downtown West Palm. Trophy space is still in demand: vacancy for that was just 3.3% in Q2, according to CBRE.

(Compare that to the national office vacancy rate which climbed to 20.8%, according to Cushman & Wakefield)

Which would explain why across the U.S., the amount of office space being built is the lowest since 2012— with only 62.6 million square feet under development as of June, according to advisory firm Plante Moran.

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• A Loan at the Top, July 20, 2025

• Another One Buys the Dust, July 6, 2025

• Put it in Reverse, June 1, 2025

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Is Now the Time to Cash Out of Miami Offices?

South Florida might still be a good place to sell an office building if you’re looking to raise some cash 💰.

Two Miami-area properties just hit the market: one from an investor eyeing a modest profit, the other tied to a headline-grabbing fraud case 😬.

🏢 First up, DWS Group is listing The Alhambra, a two-building complex in Coral Gables, for a target price of around $125 million, per The Real Deal. That would be a slight gain from the $118.5 million the German asset manager paid for the place back in 2015.

The 14- and 7-story buildings (separated by the Hyatt Regency, which isn’t for sale) are 89% and 83% leased, respectively, with tenants including Disney Latin America, a law firm, and a bridesmaid dress shop.

DWS has been shedding South Florida office assets lately. Earlier this year, it offloaded three towers in downtown Fort Lauderdale for nearly half a billion combined.

🏖️ Meanwhile, over in Miami Beach, the nearly vacant Lincoln Place is back on the market, according to the Real Deal. The 8-story office building at 1601 Washington Avenue is being offered with a target price of $82 million—and a messy backstory.

What’s for sale isn’t the land (that’s still owned by the City of Miami Beach), but the long-term ground lease to the building on it, which runs through 2092. That lease was once at the center of a crowdfunding scandal involving developer Elie Schwartz, who was sentenced to 87 months in prison for misappropriating $62.8 million from investors.

The planned sale of the building and ground lease was supposed to help repay those investors. It didn’t go as planned 😵‍💫. Now, the ground lease (taken over by Schwartz’s lender, Granite Point Mortgage Trust) is back on the market.

The building has just 14.8% occupancy and no leased retail space. But, you know, location.

📊 Investors seem to be warming up to buying Miami office buildings again: the dollar volume of office sales in Miami-Dade doubled in the first half of 2025 compared to the same time last year, hitting $600 million—the highest for that period since 2022, according to a Miami Commercial Realtors report.

In St. Pete, $27 Million Just Set a Home Price Record

A penthouse at the future Waldorf Astoria Residences St. Petersburg sold for $27 million, setting a new record for the most expensive home sale in both that city and the Greater Tampa Bay region.

The two-story residence will eventually top what’s set to become the St. Petersburg’s tallest building. The buyer is a local business leader and civic booster with strong ties to the area, according to Waldorf’s co-developer, PMG, which announced the record-breaking deal this week.

Appraiser Miller Samuel, which tracks home sales and pricing in the region, confirmed that the $27 million sale shatters all local residential records. Until now, the top single-family home sale in St. Petersburg was a $13 million deal three years ago, while the highest condo sale in the region was an $11.6 million unit at Tampa’s Ritz-Carlton in 2021, according to to Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel.

The future Waldorf penthouse will span 10,684 square feet and include a 50-foot private pool and a layout customized with help from the development team, which also includes Feldman Equities and City Office REIT $CIO ( 0.0% ) .

Construction on the 50-story building ( the Waldorf Astoria brand’s first foray onto Florida’s west coast) is expected to begin in early 2026, with completion in 2030.

Condos at the property, which range from 2,031 square feet to 3,408 square feet, start at $2.5 million. So far, 10% of building’s 163 units have found takers since sales began in April, the developer said.

Beyond the penthouse, the project includes over 73,000 square feet of Class-A office space, and about 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail. The Residences will be managed by Hilton.

A Bulldozer-Ready Miami Beach Estate, for $105 Million

What do you do with a perfectly nice $105 million Miami Beach estate? If you’re developer Todd Glaser, you knock it down and aim to set a U.S. price record.

Glaser, and investor partners Jarrett and Sean Posner, closed on the 2.3-acre waterfront property at 5940 North Bay Road this week, the Real Deal reported. The existing 19,000-square-foot home (complete with tennis court, dock, and a brand-new seawall) is headed for the bulldozer.

In its place will rise a 35,000-square-foot spec mansion with a 27-car garage, movie theater, wellness center, paddle and pickleball courts, and two pools. The developers have already picked a real estate agent to market the doesn’t-yet-exist home, which will ask $300 million.

If that sounds ambitious, that’s because it is. The highest price ever paid for a U.S. residence is $238 million — billionaire Ken Griffin’s 2019 purchase of a Central Park-adjacent penthouse. A $300 million sale in Miami would set a new national record.

The future buyer would be joining a neighborhood that counts David and Victoria Beckham, Shakira, and billionaire media mogul Barry Diller among its residents.

As for the sellers of the site, developer Sonny Kahn and his wife Suzanne, they paid just $2.4 million for the property back in 1991.

That’s it for today!

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