Six deals worth reading this week. The through-line: whoever owns your building next is the person who resets your rent.
Industrial is competing against itself. An aircraft engine company signed a Miami-Dade headquarters lease this week — aviation MRO chasing the same big-box and flex bays as third-party logistics and e-commerce. Three industries, one inventory pool. If your requirement runs 50,000 SF or more in Miami-Dade, you are bidding against users with better credit and faster committees than yours. Start twelve months out. Six is already late.
For scale on what that space is worth to whoever owns it: recorded industrial sales in Miami-Dade this year sit in a band of roughly $265 to $370 per square foot across the middle half of 50 deduplicated transactions, median $293. That is a range, and it needs to stay one — more on why at the bottom.
J.P. Morgan's fund bought Miami-Dade warehouses for $38.5M. New institutional owner, new underwriting. The legacy rate you got from a family owner who liked you does not survive a fund's model. If your landlord just sold, your renewal already changed and nobody sent you a letter about it.
El-Ad paid $62.3M for a Coconut Grove office building. Boutique, well-located Miami-Dade office is holding while plenty of national office markets are not. Expect that landlord to hold firm on rate and buy you off with TI instead. Take the TI. It is real money and it does not compound into the next renewal the way base rent does.
Retail traded twice at $17M — Cervera's Miami-Dade plaza and a Design District retail condo. Investor appetite for South Florida retail has not blinked, which for a retail tenant means thinner concessions than the 2021 reset. Free rent shrinks before base rent moves.
Impact windows stopped being background noise. Renewed attention on impact-window compliance for commercial buildings, and on a NNN lease that retrofit is a pass-through fight waiting to happen. Most standard forms amortize "capital improvements required by law" and run them straight through CAM. Ask three things before you sign: is the building compliant, is a retrofit scheduled, and does your CAM exclusion actually exclude it. The third one is where the money is.
Office demand is broadening past Brickell. Alphabet's expansion at 1450 Brickell and the reported record family-office lease got the coverage. The number that matters more is the roughly 45% jump in Q2 Miami office leasing overall — demand outside the trophy towers, which should push sublease and second-generation space back into the market over the next few quarters. I wrote about why that record rent is not your rent.
Where I come down
The industrial squeeze is real, and I would treat it as the binding constraint on any Miami-Dade requirement over 25,000 SF this year. The office headlines are close to noise for anyone under 20,000 SF.
The honest limit: if absorption cools this winter, leverage swings back toward tenants faster than these sale prices suggest, and the owners underwriting today's rents at today's cap rates will be the first ones discounting. That is why I would hold term shorter than feels comfortable right now — an option instead of a long base term. Being wrong on a five-year deal costs more than being early on a three.
More market reads in the blog archive, including Tuesday's roundup and the Broward occupancy cost breakdown.
Sitting on the other side of this as an owner rather than a tenant? See what property actually sold for or request a broker opinion of value — most people land first on Miami sold comps or Doral.
Talk to Mattis Advisors before the renewal letter shows up, not after.