Miami Office Tower Trades for $50M

1688 Meridian Avenue. Image courtesy of JLL Capital Markets

Ivy Realty has sold 1688 Meridian Ave., an 88,419-square-foot Class A office building in Miami Beach, Fla., for $49.5 million to an entity tied to Greenacres Management, according to public records. The office tower includes 7,600 square feet of ground-floor retail and was 81.4 percent leased at the time of sale.

The transaction also included two parcels located at 1699 and 1709 Jefferson Ave., totaling roughly 26,000 square feet, that currently serve as parking lots. JLL Capital Markets worked on behalf of the seller, while also securing the acquisition loan financed through Värde Partners.

The 10-story property, designed by renowned architect Morris Lapidus in 1961, underwent renovations in 1999 and 2019, according to CommercialEdge data. The multi-tenant property provides 9,687-square-foot floor plates. The creative office building has a weighted average lease term of 6 years. The tenant roster includes Regus, Levey Lieberman, GDS Group and NEXT Management, among others.

The office tower offers easy access to Interstate 195. Downtown Miami is less than 8 miles away, while Miami International Airport is roughly 11 miles from the property.

Miami’s active office market

As of July, the office vacancy rate was 14.2 percent across metro Miami, according to CommercialEdge data. While the figure is below the U.S. average, it represents a 160-basis-point hike over 12 months.

That said, the market is far from stagnant, with Uber expanding its Miami footprint after seven years in Brickell, where the metro’s largest office property is also underway. The 637,000-square-foot project known as 830 Brickell Plaza is expected to come online in 2022. As of July, the metro had nearly 2.8 million square feet of office space under construction, up from roughly 2.5 million square feet one month prior, CommercialEdge also shows.