Sell your commercial property in South Florida.
Thinking about selling office, retail, industrial, or mixed-use property in South Florida? Start with a free, comps-based Broker Opinion of Value — then get a broker who runs the sale with the same tenant-side rigor and no landlord conflicts.
No conflicts — by design
My practice has one bright line: I represent tenants leasing, owners selling, and buyers acquiring — never a landlord across the table from a tenant. Selling your building isn’t a landlord-versus-tenant negotiation, so there’s no conflict with my tenant work. You get an advocate whose only job is your outcome, and whose day job is knowing what the buy side is really thinking.
How a sale works
Start with your property’s value — free
Tell me about the property (address, size, type) and I’ll come back with a comps-based Broker Opinion of Value and a straight read on where it should price. No obligation.
Justin Crow is a Florida-licensed commercial real estate broker with Mattis Advisors. The Broker Opinion of Value is a broker’s estimate, not a certified appraisal.
Frequently asked
Do you only represent tenants?
Tenant representation is my core practice, but I also represent owners selling commercial property (disposition) and buyers acquiring it. The line I hold is simple: I never represent a landlord across the table from a tenant. Selling your building doesn’t create that conflict — so owners get the same conflict-free advocacy tenants do.
How do you determine what my property is worth?
I start with a Broker Opinion of Value built from real recorded comparable sales in your submarket and asset class, then adjust for income, lease terms, condition, and land. You get a defensible range — not a guess — before we decide on a strategy.
What does it cost to have you sell my property?
A listing engagement is paid through the transaction commission, typically at closing — not out of pocket up front. We’ll agree on terms before anything is listed. The initial Broker Opinion of Value is free.
Which areas do you cover?
Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach counties — office, retail, industrial, and mixed-use commercial property.
Should I sell my commercial building vacant or leased?
It depends on the buyer. An investor is buying income, so a solid lease with real term remaining adds value. An owner-user is buying a place to run their business, and a building with a tenant in it is unusable to them, so the same lease removes that buyer from the pool. Since roughly seven in ten tri-county commercial sales are buildings under 10,000 square feet, where owner-users are common, this should be a deliberate decision rather than a default.
Do I have to list my commercial property publicly to sell it?
No. A quiet or off-market process reaches a smaller buyer pool but avoids the visible price history a stale public listing creates, and where tenants, staff or competitors should not know yet, that is often the right trade. A broad marketing effort usually produces the higher number when the building is priced correctly from the start. Which approach fits is a strategy decision made after the valuation, not before.
What does it cost to sell a commercial property in Florida, beyond commission?
Budget for documentary stamp tax on the deed, title and closing costs, any negotiated repairs arising from inspection, prorated property taxes, and paying off an existing mortgage including any prepayment penalty. On a leased building, expect the buyer to require a tenant estoppel. None of these are surprises if they are identified before going to market.
Your tax bill is not your sale price
Almost every owner I talk to opens with the county's number. It is the only value anyone ever hands you unprompted, it arrives in the mail once a year, and it feels official. It is also the wrong number to price a sale from, and owners who anchor on it usually anchor low.
I keep a record of recorded commercial sales across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach — 6,186 transactions from 2021 through 2026, across 90 cities. Comparing each sale price against the county's assessed just value for the same parcel in the same year gives a straightforward answer to a question owners ask constantly.
| Property type | Sales | 25th pct | Median | 75th pct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Industrial | 1,094 | 1.17× | 1.30× | 1.54× |
| Retail | 1,039 | 1.14× | 1.31× | 1.69× |
| Office | 810 | 1.13× | 1.26× | 1.46× |
Sale price divided by the county assessed just value for the same parcel and year. Recorded tri-county commercial sales, 2023–2026. Ratios outside 0.3×–5× excluded as non-arm's-length.
The median sale closes about 30% above the assessed value. That is the useful headline, but the spread underneath it is the part that matters to you. The middle half of sales runs from roughly 1.13× to 1.69×. On a building assessed at $1.2 million, that is a range from $1.36 million to $2.03 million — and the assessment tells you nothing about where inside that band your particular building sits.
What decides it is income, condition, land, and which buyer you end up in front of. None of those are in the assessment, which is why a starting number that comes from a property record and not from comparable sales is a starting number I would not use.
If you want the other half of that arithmetic — not the multiple over assessed value but the raw price per square foot, broken out by county, by property type and by building size — I put it on what is my commercial property worth, along with the three valuation methods and an honest list of what public record cannot see. County-level detail sits on Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
Fewer sales, higher prices: what that means if you are the one selling
The tri-county market has changed shape over the last five years, and the change cuts both ways for an owner.
| Year | Recorded sales | Median $/SF |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 1,519 | $255 |
| 2022 | 1,435 | $299 |
| 2023 | 1,029 | $327 |
| 2024 | 1,057 | $346 |
| 2025 | 823 | $373 |
Recorded commercial sales, Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. 2026 is a partial year and is excluded from the trend.
Recorded sale volume fell about 46% between 2021 and 2025 while the median price per square foot rose about 46%. Values held and kept climbing; the number of trades did not.
The good news is obvious. The part owners underestimate is what a thin market does to a listing that starts too high. When 1,500 buildings a year are trading, an overpriced listing sits in a crowd and nobody notices it. When 800 are trading, every serious buyer in your asset class sees your building, and they all watch it not sell. Then the price cut comes, and the cut is read as weakness rather than as a correction. I have watched buildings lose more to a stale listing than the seller was ever arguing about at the start.
In a market this thin, the price you launch at is close to the only shot you get. That is the whole argument for spending real time on the valuation before anything goes live.
This is an owner-user market, not an institutional one
Of those 6,186 sales, 4,373 — about seven in ten — were buildings under 10,000 square feet. More than half closed under $2 million. Only 670 cleared $10 million.
That distribution should shape how your building goes to market. The most likely buyer of a small South Florida commercial property is not a fund with an acquisitions team. It is a business owner who wants to stop paying rent, a local investor with one or two other buildings, or a neighbouring operator who wants the parcel next door. Those buyers behave nothing like institutional capital.
They are slower and they are more emotional. They tour in person, often more than once. They care about the roof, the parking, and whether their trucks can turn around, and they will walk over things a fund would price into the deal and move on. They also frequently need SBA financing, which adds time and adds conditions — and which means the buyer with the highest number on paper is not always the buyer who closes.
Marketing a $1.5 million warehouse the way you would market a $30 million portfolio wastes the listing. The buyer pool is local, findable, and small enough to work directly, and that is a different job than posting a listing and waiting.
What actually moves the number
Income and lease strength
If the building is leased, you are not selling a building — you are selling an income stream, and every weakness in that stream gets priced. Remaining term, escalations, who pays taxes and insurance, whether the tenant has a purchase option, whether there is a personal guarantee behind a small tenant. Two identical buildings with different lease documents are worth materially different amounts, and buyers' brokers know exactly where to look. I know because that is the side of the table I spend most of my week on.
Deferred maintenance
Roof age, the condition of the electrical service, HVAC at end of life, and any open permit are the standard levers used to reprice a deal after inspection. A buyer who finds a fifteen-year-old roof during diligence will ask for more than the roof costs, because by then you are committed and they know it. Knowing about it before you list is worth more than fixing it — sometimes you fix it, sometimes you price it in and take the discussion off the table.
Land, zoning and the parcel underneath
In parts of South Florida the land is worth more than the improvement, and the building is a temporary use of a redevelopment site. If that is your situation, pricing off building comps leaves a large amount of money on the table. It is worth knowing before you market it, because the two buyer pools are entirely separate and you reach them differently. That is a land and development question, not a building question.
Insurance and the cost of ownership
Florida insurance has moved enough in recent years that it now shows up directly in what buyers will pay. A buyer underwriting your building is underwriting a current premium, not the one you were paying four years ago, and on a small building that line can swing the achievable price. Have the current numbers ready. Being vague about operating costs invites a buyer to assume the worst and price for it.
Why the valuation comes before the listing conversation
I do not ask an owner to sign anything before they know what the building is worth. The order matters, and it is deliberate.
A Broker Opinion of Value built from recorded comparable sales in your submarket and asset class gives you a defensible range. With that in hand you can make an actual decision: sell now, sell in two years, lease it up first and sell into a stronger income story, or not sell at all. Some of the most useful conversations I have with owners end with them keeping the building, and I would rather be the person who told them that than the person who listed it anyway.
What I will not do is give you a number to win the listing. That practice is common and it is expensive for the owner, because the number that wins a listing presentation is not the number the market pays. The building sits, the price comes down twice, and the eventual sale clears below where an honest opening price would have landed. You can start with a free Broker Opinion of Value and decide from there.
Selling is not always the answer
A sale is one way to get to what an owner actually wants, and often it is not the best one. The question I ask first is never "what do you want for it" — it is what you want to happen, and why now.
If you run your business out of the building and want the equity without moving the company, a sale-leaseback gets you the capital and keeps you in the space, and the lease you sign as part of it matters as much as the price. If you are selling the business and the real estate together, those are two assets with two buyer pools and separating them frequently produces more total. If the goal is cash for something else, a refinance may get you there without triggering the tax event a sale creates. If you are selling to buy something larger, the exchange timeline needs to be built into the plan before you go to market, not after you are under contract.
If you are not sure which of those fits, the owner goal planner walks through six questions and tells you which direction your answers point to. It takes a couple of minutes, nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to send it, and it will give you a more useful starting point than a price alone.
I am a broker, not a CPA or an attorney. Tax treatment and entity structure belong with your own advisors, and the good ones should be in the conversation before you sign a contract rather than after.
More questions owners ask
How much is my commercial property worth in South Florida?
The honest answer is a range, and it comes from recorded comparable sales in your submarket and asset class rather than from the county assessment. As a rough calibration, tri-county commercial sales from 2023 onward closed at a median of about 1.26× to 1.31× the assessed just value depending on type, with the middle half of sales spanning roughly 1.13× to 1.69×. Where your building sits in that band depends on income, condition, land and buyer pool — which is what a Broker Opinion of Value is for.
How long does it take to sell a commercial building?
Plan on six to nine months from the decision to the closing table for a typical small South Florida commercial property, and longer if the buyer needs SBA financing or the building is vacant. Roughly two to four months of that is marketing and negotiation; the rest is diligence, financing and closing. Owners who need to be out by a specific date should start well before that date, because a compressed timeline is visible to buyers and it costs money.
Should I sell my building vacant or leased?
It depends entirely on who your buyer is. An investor is buying income, so a solid lease with real term remaining adds value. An owner-user is buying a place to run their business, and a building with a tenant in it is unusable to them — so the same lease that helps with one buyer removes the other from the pool. Since roughly seven in ten sales here are buildings under 10,000 square feet, where owner-users are common, that call is worth making deliberately rather than by default.
Do I have to list publicly to sell?
No. A quiet or off-market process reaches a smaller buyer pool but avoids the visible price history that a stale public listing creates, and for some owners — particularly where tenants, staff or competitors should not know yet — that is the right trade. A broad marketing effort usually produces the higher number when the building is priced correctly from the start. Which one fits is a strategy decision we make after the valuation, not before.
What does it cost to sell, beyond the commission?
Budget for documentary stamp tax on the deed, title and closing costs, any negotiated repairs coming out of inspection, prorated taxes, and the cost of paying off an existing mortgage including any prepayment penalty. On a leased building, expect the buyer to want an estoppel from each tenant. None of these are surprises if they are on the table before you go to market, and all of them are surprises if they are not.
Can you sell a property I own outside your usual asset types?
I work across office, retail, industrial, mixed-use and land in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. If a property falls outside what I can genuinely serve well, I will tell you and point you to someone who can. That is a better outcome for you than an engagement I take because it was offered.
Market data: Broward · Miami-Dade · Palm Beach · owner goal planner · Justin Crow, South Florida commercial broker