What commercial property actually sold for in South Florida

Broward County — 24 markets, 2,710 sales

Miami-Dade County — 25 markets, 3,666 sales

Palm Beach County — 18 markets, 1,725 sales

The regional picture, in three numbers

Across 6,186 qualifying single-parcel commercial sales recorded in 90 South Florida municipalities between 2021 and 2026, the median price was $321 per square foot of building area. The lower quartile was $212; the upper was $528.

Anyone can quote a median. The reason to care about the quartiles is that they show the median is nearly useless on its own: the middle half of this market spans a 2.5x range, so a building at the bottom of that band and one at the top are both entirely normal. If someone has given you a per-foot number for your property without telling you where it sits in that spread, they have told you almost nothing.

About a third of these transactions — 31.8% — were buildings between 5,000 and 25,000 square feet, which is the band most owner-users and private investors actually operate in.

Median by asset type and county

Miami-Dade carries a premium in every category, which surprises nobody. The more useful comparison is Broward industrial at a $213 median against Miami-Dade industrial at $264 — a 24% gap between counties that share a border, for the same kind of building. That gap is why an industrial requirement that can tolerate a Broward address is frequently a cheaper requirement.

How to read a comparable against your own building

A comp is only useful if it is genuinely comparable, and four things decide that far more than distance does.

Use, then size band, then vintage, then submarket. In that order. A warehouse two blocks away is a worse comp for your warehouse than a warehouse of the same size and era three miles away, because size and age drive cost per foot harder than geography does inside a single county.

Bigger buildings trade lower per foot. Consistently. The fixed costs of a building spread across more square feet, so a 30,000-foot building will show a lower per-foot number than a 6,000-foot one on the same street, and that is not a discount — it is arithmetic. Comparing across size bands without adjusting is the most common mistake I see owners make with public data.

Check whether the land is the asset. On older, low-coverage properties the improvements can be worth less than the dirt, and a developer buyer prices the site rather than the building. When that is true, per-foot-of-building comps stop meaning very much. That is a different analysis: what your land is worth to a developer.

Income changes everything on a leased asset. Two identical buildings, one with three years left at below-market rent and one with ten years at market, are not the same investment and will not trade at the same number. Vacant-and-available and fully-leased are different products.

None of this is an appraisal, and the distinction matters more than people assume: how a broker opinion of value, an appraisal and a CMA actually differ.

About this data. Sale prices and building characteristics come from county property appraiser records and are public information. Figures shown are single-parcel arm’s-length transactions only — multi-parcel portfolio sales booked at one price across several folios are excluded, because dividing a portfolio price by one building’s area produces a per-foot number that never happened. Records with placeholder building areas are excluded for the same reason. This is market reference information, not an appraisal, and not an opinion of value for any specific property. County records can contain errors and lag actual closing dates.