Miami-Dade Office: the median is not your number

The number everyone quotes for Miami-Dade office is $438 per square foot. That is the median of 778 arm's-length deed transfers I have recorded since 2021, and it is accurate. It is also close to useless as a pricing input, and I want to show you exactly why before you use it on your own building.

The interquartile range around that median runs from $322 to $584. A spread that wide does not describe a market. It describes a mix.

Sort the same 778 sales by building size and the fog lifts

Here is what Miami-Dade office actually cleared at, broken out by the size of the building that sold:

• Under 2,500 SF: 485 sales, median $449/SF
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: 158 sales, median $501/SF
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: 62 sales, median $340/SF
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: 26 sales, median $276/SF
• 50,000 SF and above: 47 sales, median $213/SF

Small office in this county trades at about 2.1 times the per-foot price of large office. $449 against $213 is a gap of $236 a foot on the identical asset class in the identical county in the identical years. Nothing about the building's quality explains that. It is a function of check size, buyer pool, and financing, and it is stable enough across every county and asset class I track that I treat it as a structural feature rather than a quirk.

I would rather show you the messy part than smooth it. The 2,500 to 10,000 SF band came in at $501, above the smallest band, so the gradient is not a clean staircase at the top. The clean part is the drop below 10,000 SF. Once a building crosses that line the price per foot falls and keeps falling, and by the time you are above 50,000 SF you are in a different market with different buyers.

The county median is really a small-building median

Look at what typifies the dataset. The median Miami-Dade office building that sold measured 1,734 square feet and traded for $825,000, built in 1983. That is a professional suite, not a tower. So when someone quotes you $438 for "Miami-Dade office," what they are handing you is the price of small-suite product with a county-wide label stapled on.

The mistake I see owners make is taking that county figure into a listing conversation on a 60,000 SF building. Priced at $438, that asset is asking roughly double what its own size band has actually cleared. The reverse error is quieter and costs more: an owner of a 1,800 SF suite who accepts $340 because a broker showed him a "market median" from a report that never separated the bands. He left real money on the table and nobody in the room knew it.

This is the whole argument for pricing off a matched comp set rather than a headline. If you want that done on a specific building, that is what a broker opinion of value is for.

Where the building sits changes the answer again

Size is the first cut. City is the second, and in Miami-Dade it is nearly as violent. Median price per foot by municipality, same dataset:

• Aventura: $670 across 47 sales
• South Miami: $631 across 23 sales
• Coral Gables: $548 across 110 sales
• Miami Beach: $534 across 25 sales
• Pinecrest: $523 across 17 sales
• Miami: $447 across 221 sales
• Doral: $372 across 64 sales
• Hialeah: $354 across 40 sales
• Miami Gardens: $288 across 18 sales

Aventura at $670 and Miami Gardens at $288 are twenty-five minutes apart. Coral Gables is the deepest office submarket in the county by count, 110 recorded sales, and at $548 it prices well above the City of Miami's $447. If your comp set crosses those municipal lines without adjustment, it is not a comp set.

Prices went up while the population went down

I represent tenants, so I watch the demand side more closely than most sellers would like. It is not confirming the price trend.

The Census Bureau's latest county estimates, covering 1 July 2024 to 1 July 2025, show Miami-Dade lost 10,115 residents, a decline of 0.36 percent, landing at 2,802,029. Underneath that, net domestic out-migration for July 2024 through June 2025 was 72,254 people, offset by 54,204 arrivals from abroad. The county is not growing. It is being replenished.

Office demand specifically looks worse than the headline. In the BLS metro employment data for July 2026, preliminary and not seasonally adjusted against July 2025, financial activities employment in the Miami metro division is down 4.0 percent. That is the sector this county markets itself on. Professional and business services managed +1.8 percent.

Against that, my recorded sales show office at $384/SF in 2021, $474 in 2024, and $476 in 2025. The trend line and the demand line are pointing in opposite directions, and I do not think anyone should pretend otherwise.

The honest counterweight

This is a tension, not a collapse. The same BLS release has Miami-Dade adding 10,800 payroll jobs over the year, up 0.8 percent, to 1,343,400, and puts the metro division's unemployment rate at 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent a year earlier and the lowest of any metropolitan division in the country. Average weekly wages hit $1,797 in the first quarter of 2026 under the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, up 4.6 percent, against a national average weekly wage of $1,654 growing at 3.9 percent.

Two cautions I will not bury. Those July 2026 job figures are preliminary. And QCEW covered employment, the administrative count that survey-based job numbers get benchmarked against, was down 7,449 in Miami-Dade for March 2026 versus March 2025. When the census disagrees with the survey, I plan around the census.

What I actually do with this

1. Find the size band first. Before any comp search, before any opinion of value, establish which of the five bands the building falls in. Everything downstream inherits that choice.
2. Then constrain by city. A Coral Gables comp does not price a Hialeah building, and 2026 has only 23 recorded office sales county-wide so far, so a thin recent set is worth less than a matched older one.
3. Discount the 25,000 to 50,000 SF read. Twenty-six sales at $276 is a real signal but a thin one. I use it as a boundary, not a target.
4. Underwrite the tenant, not the trend. With financial activities down 4.0 percent, a single-tenant office building's value is mostly a credit question wearing a real estate costume.

If you are on the occupier side of this, the gradient works in your favor and most landlords have not priced it in. That is the conversation I have on office tenant representation assignments. For the full county picture across all three asset classes, start with the Miami-Dade market overview.