The revival of South Florida’s office market isn’t just a Miami thing. (There's enough ergonomically designed chairs to go around.) Fort Lauderdale’s getting love from tenants and investors, too, Pointe Group Advisors VP of leasing Alfie Hamilton says—and the two markets aren’t cutting into each other’s action (much).
Alfie (snapped with a recent catch) tells us that the Fort Lauderdale CBD office market doesn’t compete directly with Downtown Miami or Brickell. “The two downtown markets often complement each other,” he explains. “Many tenants in Downtown Fort Lauderdale have office locations in Miami as well, so that they can service their clients properly across South Florida.” Miami-Dade and Broward are competing more for large back-office or support center requirements, Alfie says. Recently TA Associates tapped Pointe Group to manage 200 E Broward in the Fort Lauderdale CBD.
Boston-based TA Associates finalized its $66M acquisition of 200 E Broward this week. The property attracted the attention of a lot of deep-pocketed investors, and CBRE vice chairman Christian Lee attributes the high level of interest in Downtown Fort Lauderdale office to the market’s fundamentals. There’s been 387k SF of absorption over the 18 months, reducing vacancy by 560 bps to 13.3%, he says—a level not seen since '08 (200 E Broward is 88% occupied). There’s also been an increase in office rents by 6.7% over the last 24 months. CBRE repped the seller in the 200 E Broward deal.
Downtown Fort Lauderdale isn’t the only part of the market seeing improvement, Berger Commercial Realty VP Joe Byrnes tells us: the strength is broad-based (he's with daughter Kelsey Skye on a recent trip to Northern California). “Leasing volume has been strong to date in 2014. I see it only getting stronger for the next six months in particular, and we’ve found that the usual summer leasing doldrums haven’t occurred yet.” That’s good news looking ahead to the last quarter, which is historically the busiest time of year for office leasing, he adds. Recently Joe repped landlord POAL WK TAFT in leasing 11k SF 6565 Taft St in Hollywood to Infinity Insurance Co.
