New Yorkers collectively had a WTF feeling on Monday.
We’re not talking about “The Slap” the night before the Oscars. (Although, yes, like everyone else, we obsessively thought about the incident — Helen Holmes of our sister publication explained why it was probably won’t do much damage to the career of Will Smith… even if maybe it should.)
No, we were thinking about what was happening with the weather.
Suddenly the temperature is in the 20s? End of March ? The snow is falling ? What is the hell was happening?!?
Well, it’s not like developers and real estate agents around the world need even more inspiration to think about relocating to sunny climes. …
Miki Naftali, one of the princes of the luxury condominium market in New York, announced he migrated south. The developer, along with Cara Real Estate Management, just spent $40.5 million on a developable parcel at Miami Worldcenter, with plans to build “two super-tall residential towers,” covering some 1.3 million square feet.
Not to be outdone, Related Group and 13th Floor Investments did a superb $500 million offer for Castle Beach Club, an oceanfront condo at 5445 Collins Avenue, located on 576 linear feet of Miami Beach, which would be the most expensive sale of the year in South Florida if it happened. (Before it can be completed, however, the deal requires the approval of a majority of the resort’s 570 owners.)
Related has good reason to be optimistic. The company had offers on the 343 fully furnished units in his ready-to-let condo in West Brickell called District 225 that he built with Airbnb in just five months.
Speaking of companies called Related, it was also revealed last week that New York Related Companies is teaming up with Swire Properties to build a 80-story, 1,040-foot-tall office buildingdubbed One Brickell City Center, which if approved would be one of Miami’s tallest skyscrapers.
But to be sure: there was residential activity beyond the Kindred. GID fell $149.8 million on a 385-unit complex in Doral at 8425 NW 41st Street when purchased from Greystar Worldwide.
And in the Flager Village of Fort Lauderdale, the Californian company Thomas Tomanek & Associates spent $195 million on Motif apartments, which includes 385 rental units at 500 N Andrews Avenue, which they purchased from Bluerock. (Well… Jay Shidler’s $108 million purchase in Fort Lauderdale almost feels like a disappointment.)
Of course, these weren’t all monster sales; there was certainly an equally colossal lease.
South Florida’s biggest industrial deal of the year fell in Miami last week, topping even the biggest industrial deals of 2021 by a good 100,000 square feet.
We are talking about FedEx signing of a 501,000 square foot lease at Miami27 Business Park. The delivery company needed a space with “access to major highways, proximity to customer distribution centers and a strong local community workforce to recruit employees,” according to a FedEx spokesperson.
Florida isn’t the only hot environment
It was also a crazy week for Los Angeles.
On Monday, Don Peebles and Victor MacFarlane proposed the 1.2 million square foot Angels Landing tower finally city guaranteed rights. When completed, the multi-year project at Bunker Hill will consist of the third-tallest building in Los Angeles, at 854 feet, and will include two hotels, condominium units, rentals, retail, dining space and a park.
In Chatsworth, Rexford Industrial Realty spent $42 million for 231,769 square feet of flexible office space with plans for an office-to-industrial conversion.
Speaking of industrial, Staley Point Capital and Bain Capital Real Estate scored $70.3 million in short-term first mortgage debt from Mesa West Capital for two industrial properties totaling 314,500 square feet in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
And there wasn’t one, but of them Notable offers for the sports freak in all of us:
LA Chargers secured $276 million in construction financing from CTL Capital for a new headquarters and training center being developed by Continental Development Corporation and Mar Ventures.
And we found out that Nike was growing in 93,166 square feet at its Water’s Edge campus in Playa Vista, bringing Nike’s total footprint in the building, WE3, to 183,000 square feet, which is the entire four-story office. (OK, it’s not technically sports — it’s sportswear. But you get the idea.)
Well done Gotham!
The city that never sleeps might suffer from insomnia because it is actively trading all the time.
Vuori, the sportswear retailer, opens its first store on the east coast at 106 Spring Street in SoHo; Maribella Hospitality Group signed a 20-year lease for the 17,350 square foot space at 7 West 51st Street where the New York Yankees Steakhouse resided to open… another high end steakhouse; software company Sigma Computing took 15,420 square feet at Zero Irving in Union Square; GFP has six new tenants (General Vision Services, INCLUDEnyc, Guth Deconzo Consulting Engineers, Kyocera Document Solutions New York Metro, Soma Salads and Lazzaro Carved Meat & Rotisserie) totaling 34,012 square feet at 520 Eighth Avenue; GPT Architecture renewed its lease of 40,000 square feet at 31 Penn Plaza; and big buck of them all: MJHS Health System, the non-profit healthcare provider, took a whopping 138,374 square feet at 55 Water Street in FiDi.
There’s been a lot of FiDi activity in general over the past week (and we’re not just talking about the Battery Park City Authority carbon neutral plan, even if there was that). Reside Health, a company-backed startup that offers medical services and COVID-19 testing to office workers, opens its doors his third clinic at 4 World Trade Center. A few steps away, Celonis, the computer company, took up an additional 40,763 square feet on the 70th floor of 1 World Trade Center, bringing the tower to 95% rented (higher than it was before the pandemic, according to the owner.)
And Harry Macklowe is gone looking for around $1.1 billion in the refinancing of 55 Wall Street, its fuss Conversion into an Art Deco condo.
Alas, we haven’t seen the same sales and development plans revealed as in LA or Miami this week.
On some level, New York is still struggling with its office space problem. For the secondary desktop product, that’s not a problem with an easy (or cheap) fix. But some owners think creatively about their B and C product. They might be transformed into flex office, for example. (Speaking of flexible space, last week Sandeep Mathrani was officially named president of WeWork, replacing Marcelo Claure, who left months ago. Mathrani has also served as CEO since 2020.)
But there are a lot of things to grab a cup of coffee and think about in terms of office stock in New York.
A question that comes up more recently is: Who owns your desktop data?
Many offices now track everything from foot traffic to how often the bathroom is used. Does it seem creepy to you that the boss keeps those tabs on you? Or is it the building that compiles this data? Or is it someone else entirely?
This is a good question to ponder this Sunday.
See you next week!
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