Broward County Office: the median is the least useful number on this page

Broward office comes down to two questions, and they have to be answered from two different datasets. What does space cost? That comes from recorded deed transfers. Which way is demand moving? That comes from federal labor data. Only one of those two is current in Broward right now, and I would rather tell you which than let you assume.

Two federal series, one direction

The Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Sunrise metropolitan division carried 908,200 payroll jobs in July 2026, down 400 over the year, per the BLS metropolitan area employment release (preliminary, not seasonally adjusted, against July 2025). As a percentage that is nothing, -0.04%. The composition underneath it is not nothing. Professional and business services, the sector that signs office leases, was down 0.9% over that same year. Financial activities fell 0.6%.

Then there is QCEW, the quarterly census of covered employment that the payroll survey eventually gets benchmarked against. Broward's covered employment is down 11,708 comparing March 2026 to March 2025. That is the worst of the three South Florida counties, against -7,449 in Miami-Dade and -2,832 in Palm Beach, at a time when the national count rose 85,572. When the survey says flat and the administrative census says down eleven thousand, I plan around the census.

Unemployment in the division went from 3.9% to 4.6% (BLS, July 2026, preliminary). Broward also lost residents: down 372 between 1 July 2024 and 1 July 2025 on the Census Bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates, with net domestic out-migration of 29,517 nearly cancelled by 24,944 international arrivals. Average weekly wage in the county is $1,543 for Q1 2026 QCEW, up 4.3%, and that is the lowest of the three counties. Miami-Dade pays $1,797 and Palm Beach $1,784 on the same series; the national figure is $1,654.

I represent tenants, so I read a soft demand picture as an opening rather than as gloom. Fewer office-using jobs means fewer competing requirements for the same suite, and the landlord's broker already knows it. If you are the one signing, this is the environment you want to be shopping in.

$277 is a blend, not a price

Across 362 recorded arm's-length office transfers in Broward, my dataset puts the median at $277 per square foot, with a 25th percentile of $186 and a 75th of $377. Median building is 4,380 SF, median year built 1980, median sale price $1,300,000. Twenty-three cities show up in that sample.

Now sort the same transfers by building size and the county number falls apart:

• Under 2,500 SF: $335/SF, 127 sales
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: $317/SF, 115 sales
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: $162/SF, 53 sales
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: $190/SF, 37 sales
• 50,000+ SF: $162/SF, 30 sales

Top band to bottom band is 2.07x. A 2,000 SF professional suite and a 60,000 SF office building are both "Broward office" and they are not remotely the same trade. Notice too where the drop happens. It is not gradual. The price holds through 10,000 SF and then falls by half. Small-bay office in Broward is a different product with a different buyer, and the buyer pool for anything above 10,000 SF is thin enough that 53 sales and 37 sales are all I have in those two bands across the entire sample.

That $277 median is doing far more work than it should. It describes a hypothetical building that mostly does not exist. Whenever an owner tells me a broker valued their property "at the county median," my first question is what the building measures, because the answer usually moves the number 40% in one direction or the other. If you want a defensible number rather than a county average, that is what a proper broker opinion of value is for.

The city ladder runs 2x from top to bottom

Geography adds a second spread on top of the size spread. Among Broward cities with at least twelve recorded office sales, Fort Lauderdale is the deepest market at 80 sales and a $322 median. Plantation runs $295 across 38 sales. Hollywood is $277 on 37. Weston prints highest at $397 but on only twelve transfers, which is enough to report and not enough to lean on. At the bottom, Sunrise is $180 on 24 sales and Pompano Beach is $160 on 18.

Fort Lauderdale to Pompano Beach is a two-times move inside one county. Stack the size effect on top of the city effect and you can build a perfectly honest case for anything between roughly $160 and $400 per foot without ever leaving Broward. That range is exactly why a seller who anchors on a single county figure loses money, and why a buyer who does the same overpays. The comparison set has to match on both axes before the number means anything.

What my sale figures are, and where they stop

Straight talk on the data. Every price above comes from recorded arm's-length deed transfers, my own dataset, not from asking prices or survey estimates. The sample spans 2021 through 2026, but Broward's recording feed thins out badly after 2024: 538 sales landed in 2021, 511 in 2022, 365 in 2023, 300 in 2024, and then 21 and 18 in the two years since. That is a pipeline break on my side, not a collapse in the Broward market.

So here is what I will and will not claim. The medians are sound as a level, because they are built from hundreds of real closed transfers. I will not tell you Broward office values are up, down, or flat over time, because the recent years are too thin to support any such statement, and neither should anyone else working from this feed. The demand figures in this report are current and carry the change-over-time story on their own. Anyone quoting you a Broward price trend should be asked how many 2025 and 2026 sales are underneath it.

If you occupy office space in Broward

Two things follow from all of this. First, run your own math on what you actually need before you tour anything; most tenants I meet are carrying 15 to 25 percent more square footage than their headcount justifies, and a space calculator is a five-minute exercise that reframes the entire search. Second, the sub-10,000 SF market is where pricing is firmest, so if your requirement is above that line you are shopping in the softest part of an already soft market and should be asking for concessions accordingly. That is the whole basis of how I handle an office tenant rep assignment here.

If you own a Broward office building

Price off your size band and your city, in that order, and treat the county median as context rather than as an input. If your building is over 10,000 SF, the honest comparable set is 53 sales in one band and 37 in another, and a thin comp set means the marketing has to work harder than the pricing. Also account for age: median year built across the whole Broward office sample is 1980, so a building from that era is normal here, not a discount story, and a 2005 building is genuinely scarce. The broader Broward market picture gives the cross-asset context.