What Is My Commercial Property Worth?

The short answer

Across 6,096 recorded arms-length commercial sales in Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach between 2021 and August 2026, the middle half traded between roughly $190 and $560 per square foot. That band is too wide to price a building from, which is the point — it is a starting position, not an answer. Size moves it more than anything else: buildings under 2,500 SF ran a median of $410 a foot, buildings over 25,000 SF ran $209. Where you land inside the band comes down to condition, tenancy, access and site potential, none of which appear in public record.

First, what is the number for?

Before anyone can tell you what your building is worth, you have to say what you need the number to do. The answer changes the work.

A list price is a marketing decision. It sits slightly above where you expect to trade, and it is chosen to attract the right buyers rather than to be correct. A refinance number has to survive a lender's appraiser, which means it lives closer to the documented middle of the comp set. A partner buyout number has to be defensible to somebody sitting across from you who does not want to pay it. An estate number is a tax date, fixed to the day somebody died. And a tax-appeal number needs a Florida-licensed appraiser, because the Value Adjustment Board is not going to take my word or yours.

Owners come to me asking one question and needing a different one about a third of the time. So I ask first.

The three ways a commercial building gets valued

Sales comparison is what most South Florida owner-user property gets valued on. You find recorded sales of buildings that resemble yours in size, use, age and location, reduce them to a price per square foot, then adjust up or down for the ways your building differs. Every table on this page is built that way.

The income approach applies when the building is really a bond — a leased investment where a buyer is purchasing the rent. You take net operating income and divide by a capitalization rate drawn from comparable trades. If your building is fully leased to somebody else, this is probably the method that matters, and the quality of the tenant will move the number more than the quality of the roof.

The cost approach asks what the land is worth plus what it would cost to rebuild, minus depreciation. It is the weakest of the three for a 1982 building, and 1982 is the median year built across the 76,099 commercial buildings I track in the tri-county. But it becomes the controlling method when the improvement has stopped mattering — and on 27.6% of those buildings, the county already assesses the land above the structure sitting on it. If you own one of those, you may not own a building at all. You own a site with an old building in the way.

What South Florida actually traded for

Two things in that table are worth pausing on.

The spread inside each county is enormous. In Miami-Dade the middle half of all sales ran from $253 to $592 a foot. That is not noise — that is Hialeah warehouse and Coral Gables office in the same column. A county median is useful for orientation and useless for pricing, which is why I do not quote one to an owner without knowing the address first.

And the direction has been up. In Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, where my 2025 records are complete, the median moved from $288 a foot in 2021 to $375 in 2025 — about 30% over four years — while the number of recorded sales fell from 988 to 802. Fewer deals, higher prices. That is a market where sellers who do transact are getting paid and the ones who are not simply are not listing.

Small buildings sell for roughly twice the price per foot of large ones

This is the single most useful pattern in the data and the one owners most often miss. A building under 2,500 square feet traded at a median of $410 a foot. A building over 25,000 traded at $209. Same three counties, same six years.

The reason is buyer depth. A 2,000-square-foot storefront can be bought by a dentist, a contractor, an attorney, a church, or an investor with a self-directed IRA — anyone who can raise a few hundred thousand dollars and qualify for an SBA loan. A 40,000-square-foot industrial building can be bought by a much shorter list of people, and every one of them runs a spreadsheet. Scarcity of buyers is a discount. Abundance of buyers is a premium.

It matters here more than in most markets, because 61.8% of the commercial buildings across Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach are under 5,000 square feet. This is a small-building region. If you own one, the per-foot number you have seen quoted for a big-box industrial comp down the street is not your number, and it is low.

What a price per square foot cannot see

Everything on this page comes from public record. Public record knows your square footage, your year built, your land area, your last recorded sale and your assessed value. It does not know a single thing that a buyer actually walks through the door and reacts to.

It cannot see clear height, or whether the truck court works, or that the electrical service is 200 amps when the buyer needs 600. It cannot see a roof that has three years left. It cannot see that your parking count fails current code and the property is grandfathered, which is worth money right up until somebody wants to change the use. It cannot see the tenant, the remaining term, or whether that lease has a below-market renewal option buried in it that will quietly cost a buyer six figures.

It also cannot see time. A recorded sale hits public record weeks to a quarter after the parties actually agreed on price, so every comp on this page is describing a negotiation that already happened. In a moving market you are reading history, not the present.

So take the band, not the point. If somebody hands you a single confident number off public record and no walk-through, they are guessing with more conviction than the data supports.

The two anchors that mislead owners most

The first is the county assessed value. Owners treat it as a floor. It is not a valuation — it is a tax figure produced by a mass-appraisal model that has never been inside your building, and in Florida it interacts with caps and exemptions that push it further from market. I see it come in low far more often than high, and I have also seen it sit above what a building would trade for. It is a data point, not an anchor.

The second is what you paid. What you paid tells you about your basis and your taxes. It tells a buyer nothing. An owner who bought in 2013 and an owner who bought in 2023 own the same building and it is worth the same amount to the market; only one of them feels good about the number.

The honest version of the third anchor, the automated online estimate, is that there is no reliable one for commercial. Residential valuation models work because houses are comparable and trade constantly. Commercial buildings are each a little bit strange, and across three counties I count roughly 1,200 recorded sales a year against 76,099 buildings. There is not enough transaction density for a model to learn your street.

How I actually get to a number

I pull every recorded arms-length sale within a defensible radius and time window, screened for use, size band and age — and I strip out the multi-parcel assemblages, because a portfolio that sold as one line item will wreck a per-foot median if you leave it in. That screening step is why the counts on this page are lower than the raw record.

Then I adjust. Condition, access, clear height or ceiling, parking ratio, the tenant and what is left on the lease, whether the site could hold something better than what is on it today. Those adjustments are judgment, and I will show you mine rather than hide them inside a number.

What comes back is a range with the comps attached, a view on where inside that range I think your building actually trades, and what I would fix or document before it goes to market — because on a small building the cheapest few thousand dollars of cleanup routinely moves the price more than a month of extra marketing.

It is free, it takes me a business day, and it does not commit you to selling. I would rather be the broker you call in two years with a number you already trust than the one who priced you high to win a listing.

I am a broker, not an appraiser and not your tax advisor. Where a lender, a court, or the Value Adjustment Board requires a USPAP appraisal, you need a licensed appraiser and I will tell you so.

Related resources.

• Sell commercial property in South Florida →
• Free Broker Opinion of Value →
• BOV vs. commercial appraisal →
• How to sell a commercial property: 2026 playbook →
• Sale-leaseback: selling without moving out →
• Recent South Florida commercial sales →
• Miami-Dade commercial property values →
• Broward commercial property values →
• Palm Beach commercial property values →

Frequently asked questions about commercial property valuation.