Rent per square foot calculator.

What the quote actually says

A landlord quotes $34. You are trying to figure out what leaves the account on the first. Annual rent is the rate times the rentable feet, monthly is that over twelve, and if the number stopped there this page would not need to exist. It does not stop there.

First trap is the basis. Almost everything in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach quotes as an annual rate per rentable foot. Some small-bay industrial landlords quote monthly. A $2.83 quote and a $34 quote are the same rent, and I have watched a tenant walk away from the cheaper of two buildings because nobody told them. Get the basis in writing before you compare anything.

Run the example. 3,000 rentable feet at $34 base is $102,000 a year, $8,500 a month. Add a $9 NNN estimate and the all-in is $43 per foot — $129,000 a year, about $10,750 a month. That is a $2,250 a month swing hiding behind a rate that looked like one number.

Rentable, usable, and the load factor nobody volunteers

You are billed on rentable square feet. Rentable includes your slice of the lobby, the corridors, the restrooms, the electrical room. Usable is where the desks go.

The gap between them is the load factor, and it is not standardized. Fifteen percent on 3,000 rentable feet leaves you about 2,609 usable. Pay for 3,000, furnish 2,609. Two suites quoting an identical $34 are not the same deal when one loads at 12% and the other at 20% — on 3,000 feet that difference is roughly 180 usable feet, which in an office plan is two offices and a copy room.

Ask for the load factor in the LOI stage, in writing, and ask how it was measured. BOMA 2017 and BOMA 1996 will give you different answers on the same floor. If a landlord will not state it, that is your answer. The tool shows cost per usable foot underneath the headline number — that is the figure to carry between buildings, not the quoted rate.

NNN, modified gross, full service: get both quotes onto one basis

NNN means base rent plus your pro-rata share of taxes, insurance, and CAM, billed monthly as an estimate and trued up after year end. Full service folds operating expenses into one number, usually with a base-year stop, which means increases above that year get passed through anyway — full service is not a fixed number, it is a delayed one. Modified gross is whatever the lease says it is, and I have seen it mean six different splits.

So a $34 NNN quote and a $44 full-service quote cannot be compared until you convert both. Put the NNN estimate in the field above and the tool does the first half. The second half is diligence: ask for the last two years of actual CAM reconciliations, not the pro forma. Landlords who produce them quickly are usually the ones whose numbers hold. The ones who stall are telling you what next year looks like.

Watch the CAM inclusions too. Management fees on a percentage of gross, capital replacements amortized in, and roof work dressed up as maintenance are the three that show up most in South Florida strip retail. Those are negotiable in the lease, and almost never negotiable after you sign it. More on that in how triple net actually works in Florida.

Is the number good? Using sale comps as a rent sanity check

Here is the honest problem. Asking rents in South Florida are not published anywhere you can verify. The listing services show what a broker typed in, not what the last tenant signed, and the gap between them is the whole game.

What is public is what buildings sold for. Every qualified commercial sale in the three counties runs through the property appraisers, and price per foot is a hard number. So work backwards. A buyer who paid $307 a foot for Doral industrial needs a return on it. At a 7% cap that is about $21.50 per foot of net rent to clear — which sets a floor under what that landlord will realistically accept, because below it they are underwriting a loss.

That is what the comp check above does. Pick your city, your product type, and the cap rate you think a buyer is underwriting to, and it converts the 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile of actual sale prices into an implied net rent band.

Where it stops. It is one leg of a triangle, not the answer. It does not know the condition of the building, whether the suite has sat empty for fourteen months, what free rent is on offer, or that the landlord has a loan maturing in March. If your quote lands well above the band, that is a question to ask, not proof of anything. If it lands below, the landlord is probably buying occupancy — take the win somewhere other than rate, on term flexibility or TI, because a cheap rate in a bad lease is still a bad lease.

What the sale data says about South Florida right now

Some of it is what you would guess. Miami-Dade industrial runs a median of $264 a foot across 1,019 sales, against $212 in Broward on 690. Doral industrial sits at $307 with 217 trades behind it, which is the deepest single-city industrial sample in the set.

Some of it is not. Sweetwater industrial medians $378 a foot on 71 sales — above Doral, above Medley at $310 — which is a small envelope of land next to the Dolphin corridor doing something the county average completely hides. Hialeah, three miles north, medians $207 on 244 sales. That is an 83% spread inside twenty minutes of driving.

Retail is where the numbers go wide. Delray Beach medians $641 a foot on 80 sales, against $267 industrial in the same city — the Atlantic Avenue effect, priced. Palm Beach proper medians $1,553 on eleven trades, and eleven trades is a number I would not build a rent argument on. Belle Glade medians $74. Same county.

Office splits the same way: Aventura at $670, Coral Gables at $548 on 110 sales, Fort Lauderdale at $322 on 80, Hollywood at $277. If someone quotes you a "South Florida office rate," ask which of those four they mean.

One thing stripped out before any of these medians are computed: multi-parcel assemblages. When a buyer takes eight contiguous storefronts in one deal, the county records the full price against every folio — which produced $217 and $1,741 a foot for neighbouring units on the same block of East Sunrise. Those are not comps. They are excluded, and it is 2,033 of 8,219 rows, a quarter of the raw file.

County records lag closings — sometimes a few weeks, sometimes a full quarter — so the most recent months in this set are always thinner than they will end up. Treat the last quarter as provisional.

Frequently asked questions