Duke Realty Breaks Ground on 501 KSF Miami Project

Duke Realty Corp. has started work on a speculative logistics building that will span more than half a million square feet northeast of Miami International Airport, amid a shortage of modern industrial space in the area.

Miami 27 Business Park Building 1. Rendering courtesy of Duke Realty

The new project is the second of two distribution facilities in the company’s Miami 27 Business Park in Medley, Fla., a small community in Miami-Dade County. Construction is also underway on the first facility—called Building 2—after Duke Realty preleased 72 percent of the space last August. The 221,984-square-foot Building 2 is slated for completion in July of this year.

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The larger Building 1 will offer 501,224 square feet of state-of-the-at logistics space adjacent to U.S. Highway 27. The property also has easy access to the Florida Turnpike, Interstate 75, and State Road 826, which provides direct connectivity to the cargo area of the Miami air hub.

Sitting on a 23.3-acre site at 10300 NW 121st Way, Building 1 is designed to meet LEED standards and will feature a clear height of 36 feet, 53 dock doors and four drive-in doors, with a capacity of as many as 108 overhead door positions. The property will also come with 112 trailer spaces and 335 parking spaces.

Duke Realty’s Florida team is experiencing interest in the planned facility, although it is not yet preleased, Stephanie Rodriquez, senior vice president of the company’s Florida region, told Commercial Property Executive.

The industrial REIT said in a statement that it continues to see demand for modern, well-located logistics properties in South Florida, in particular for large blocks of distribution space. Duke Realty added that its in-service portfolio in the region is currently 99 percent leased, while its Miami properties are 100 percent leased.

Building boom

The area north of the Miami International Airport has become a center of speculative industrial development. According to Cushman & Wakefield, the Airport North/Medley submarket had more than 1.7 million square feet of industrial projects under construction at the end of the first quarter, accounting for 54 percent of the more than 3.1 million square feet underway in Miami-Dade.

All space under construction was speculative, the brokerage noted in its first-quarter market report, but there were several build-to-suit projects scheduled to break ground within a few months. New leasing activity in Miami-Dade topped 2.3 million square feet in the first quarter, up 27.2 percent year-over-year. E-commerce and distribution firms remained the primary drivers for demand growth.

Warehouse and distribution asking rents jumped 8.8 percent year-over-year to $8.56 per square foot NNN, the largest annual gain, according to the report. Rent in the Airport North/Medley submarket was $8.91 and overall vacancy stood at 4 percent at the end of the quarter.