Broward County Retail: a 2.7x spread hiding inside one median

The widest price spread in my entire dataset

I keep medians for three asset types across three South Florida counties, nine combinations in all. Broward retail has the biggest internal spread of any of them, and it is not close.

Sorted by building size, Broward retail transfers look like this:

• Under 2,500 SF: $491/SF, 161 sales
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: $366/SF, 308 sales
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: $264/SF, 97 sales
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: $254/SF, 23 sales
• 50,000+ SF: $180/SF, 33 sales

That is $491 at the small end and $180 at the large end, a 2.7x spread. For comparison, Broward office runs 2.07x across its bands and Broward industrial only 1.36x. A small freestanding building and an anchored center are not variants of one product. They are two markets that happen to share a zoning category.

Which means the county median for Broward retail, $342 per square foot across 622 recorded transfers, is almost entirely an artifact of which sizes happened to close. The 25th percentile is $216 and the 75th is $595. Median building 4,250 SF, median year built 1978, median sale price $1,990,000. That $342 is doing far more work than it should. It sits between two bands that do not resemble each other and describes neither.

The mistake I see owners make is taking a county median, applying it to their square footage, and calling it a valuation. On a 30,000 SF Broward center that method overstates value by roughly a third before anyone has looked at the rent roll.

Davie prints higher than Fort Lauderdale, and that is not an error

Here is where the size gradient starts explaining things that otherwise look strange. Among Broward cities with at least twelve recorded retail sales, Davie tops the ladder at $484 per square foot on 28 sales. Pembroke Pines is $457 on 30. Margate is $446 on 13. Meanwhile Fort Lauderdale, the deepest retail market in the county with 103 recorded sales, comes in at $321.

Nobody thinks Davie retail real estate is intrinsically worth 50% more than Fort Lauderdale retail. What is happening is product mix. Suburban western Broward trades small inline and freestanding pads, which live in the $491 and $366 bands. A county seat with a century of built stock trades a much wider mix, including the large older boxes that price at $180 to $264. The city median is measuring the inventory, not the desirability.

The rest of the ladder: Plantation $410 on 25 sales, Deerfield Beach $358 on 32, Miramar $351 on 27, Coral Springs $347 on 41, Wilton Manors $346 on 28, Sunrise $322 on 32, Hollywood $294 on 48, Pompano Beach $272 on 50, Lauderhill $267 on 20, and Oakland Park at the bottom at $262 on 33.

Read that list as a map of what trades where, not as a ranking of quality. If you are comparing two properties across city lines, the only comparison worth making is same size band, same format, same city tier.

One more thing the ladder does not show. Median year built across the whole Broward retail sample is 1978, and median sale price is $1,990,000. That combination tells you what this county's retail stock actually is: mid-size, nearly fifty years old, and priced where deferred capital work is a live negotiating issue on most deals. If a seller wants a premium for a 1978 building, the burden is on the systems and the roof, not on the address.

Read the vintage on these numbers before you use them

Every figure above comes from recorded arm's-length deed transfers in my own dataset, not asking prices and not survey estimates. They reflect transfers recorded through 2024. My Broward feed runs 538 sales in 2021, 511 in 2022, 365 in 2023, 300 in 2024, and then falls off a cliff to 21 in 2025 and 18 in 2026.

That drop is a recording pipeline problem on my end, not a Broward market event. It has one consequence, and I want it stated plainly rather than buried: I will not give you a Broward retail price trend. Not up, not down, not flat. Twenty-one sales cannot carry a year-over-year claim and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What the medians do support is a level, because each one rests on dozens to hundreds of closed transfers spread across four strong years. Use them to place a property within a range. Do not use them to argue direction.

The demand data below is a different story. It is public, current, and it can carry direction.

Retail employment was the one line that held

Broward's labor picture is the hardest of the three South Florida counties, with one exception that happens to be the one retail owners care about.

The Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach-Sunrise metropolitan division held 908,200 payroll jobs in July 2026, down 400 over the year per the BLS metropolitan employment release (preliminary, not seasonally adjusted). Professional and business services fell 0.9%. Financial activities fell 0.6%. Retail trade employment rose 0.2%, the only positive of the three counties on that line; Miami-Dade and Palm Beach both came in at -0.1%.

The rest is not encouraging. Unemployment in the division moved from 3.9% to 4.6% (BLS, July 2026, preliminary). QCEW covered employment, the administrative count that payroll surveys get benchmarked against, is down 11,708 comparing March 2026 to March 2025, the worst of the three counties, against a national gain of 85,572. Broward lost 372 residents between 1 July 2024 and 1 July 2025 on Census Vintage 2025 estimates, with net domestic out-migration of 29,517 offset by 24,944 international arrivals.

Household spending capacity is the part I would watch if I owned a center. Broward's median household income is $81,488 on the 2024 ACS one-year estimates, essentially at the national $81,604, but the county's average weekly wage is $1,543 for Q1 2026 QCEW, the lowest of the three counties and well under the $1,654 national figure. Miami-Dade runs $1,797 and Palm Beach $1,784. Broward retail is not selling into a high-wage trade area, and tenant sales projections should reflect that.

Three ways this data changes what you do

1. If you are selling, price from your size band first and your city second. A 12,000 SF center belongs against the $264 band and 97 comparable sales, not against a $342 county median. Getting this right at the outset is most of the job in selling a commercial property here.
2. If you are buying, the large-format bands are where the pricing is softest and the comp counts are thinnest. Twenty-three sales in the 25,000 to 50,000 SF band across the whole county means every comp argument is contestable, in both directions.
3. If you are leasing space, the small-suite end of Broward retail is the tightest and most expensive part of the market on a per-foot basis. That is exactly the segment where a tenant needs someone pushing back on asking rent and on the total occupancy load, which is how I approach a retail tenant rep assignment.