Commercial property price benchmark

What a buyer will actually pay

Every owner who calls me opens the same way: what is it worth. The honest answer is that value is three legs — what comparable buildings sold for, what the income supports, and what it would cost to replace. Public record gives you the first leg cleanly. This page gives it to you two different ways so you can see whether they agree.

What it will not do is guess at your rent roll. If your building is half empty, or your one tenant has a below-market lease with eight years to run, no comp set on earth prices that correctly. That is the conversation after this page, not instead of it.

Method one: price per building foot

The blunt instrument, and still the one most brokers lead with. Take what similar buildings in your city sold for, divide by their square footage, apply the range to yours.

It is only as good as the recorded square footage, which is not always right — the county has your building at whatever the last permit said, and additions get missed. The spreads are also wide enough that the city matters more than almost anything else. Miami-Dade industrial medians $264 a foot across 1,019 sales. Broward industrial medians $212 across 690. Delray Beach retail medians $641; industrial a mile west medians $267. A "South Florida price per foot" is not a number, it is an average of things that have nothing to do with each other.

Method two: what the county thinks, versus what buyers paid

This is the one almost nobody runs, and it is the reason this page exists.

Your county just value is public, it is on your tax bill, and you know it without measuring anything. Across 5,662 qualified sales the median deal closed at 1.20x just value. That multiple is stable enough to be useful and variable enough to be interesting.

Fort Lauderdale office trades at a median 1.11x assessed across 77 sales. Doral industrial at 1.20x across 217. Delray Beach retail at 1.32x across 79, and Delray industrial at 1.36x. Zoom out and Broward runs closer to assessment across the board — office 1.09x, industrial 1.11x — while Palm Beach runs 1.26x office and 1.29x retail. That is not Palm Beach being hotter. It is two appraiser’s offices with different practices and different lag, and the multiple is measuring the lag as much as the market.

Which is exactly why you use it as a cross-check and not as a rule.

When the two disagree

The interesting case, and the one worth a phone call.

$/SF says more than the assessment multiple does. Usually the county has you under-assessed — often a renovation or a build-out the appraiser never caught. Good news on the sale, and worth knowing before you market it, because a buyer’s lender will order an appraisal that finds the same thing.

The assessment multiple says more than $/SF does. Usually condition, or a functional problem the comps do not carry — clear height under twenty feet in an industrial bay, a parking ratio that fails for retail, a floor plate nobody wants. Sometimes it is a recorded square footage that is simply too big.

I have had both. The second one is the reason I walk buildings before I quote a number.

What moves your number past the comps

Tenancy first. A single tenant with credit and seven years left is a different asset than the same box vacant, and it prices off the lease, not the comp set. Term remaining is the whole argument on a net-leased building.

Then the things that quietly cap your buyer pool: a use restriction in the deed, an environmental condition on an old auto or dry-cleaning parcel, a shared-access agreement nobody wrote down properly, a roof at year twenty-two. None of those show up in a median. All of them show up in the offer.

And timing on your side of the table — your basis, your debt maturity, depreciation recapture, whether you have a 1031 target lined up. Those do not change what the building is worth. They change whether you should sell it.

What this tool cannot tell you

It cannot see inside the building. It cannot see your leases. It excludes vacant land on purpose, because land trades on entitlements and density and blending it in would make every number worse. County records lag closings by weeks and sometimes a full quarter, so the newest months here are thinner than they will end up.

And a median is a median. If your city and product type show eleven sales behind the number, treat it as a direction, not a valuation. The tool tells you the sample size every time for exactly that reason.

Frequently asked questions