Developers Stambul, Miami Real Exposure and P & K Developments are bringing a 42,000-square-foot, mixed-use development called Eden to Miami’s Little River neighborhood.

Records show Miami-based companies 8045 NE 1 Avenue Properties and 79th Street Development bought the two parcel site at 235 and 237 Northeast 79th Street in May for $2.6 million. The entities share a 50 percent interest.

Eden will consist of four buildings offering restaurant, retail and office space. No leases have been signed yet, but rates are $18 per square foot to $35 per square foot, according to a spokesperson for Bloommiami. The development is slated to open in the the first quarter of 2018.

Rendering of Eden (Credit: Bloommiami)

Bloommiami is the architect. The architect and design firm also worked with Stambul in the redevelopment of the Langford Hotel in Downtown Miami. Other projects Stambul is working on include redeveloping the 145-room Clarion Inn near the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale.

Rendering of Eden (Credit: Bloommiami)

Compared to nearby communities like the Design District and the MiMo District, Little River has typically seen less development, but investors are starting to take notice. Last year, Miami’s planning and zoning board approved Little River’s first restaurant with a full-service bar. The site at 7220 North Miami Avenue was a former car repair shop. The property, owned by Avra Jain and Matthew Vander Werff, will be a craft cocktail lounge and bar called Apollo Motors.

 

Source: Real Deal

Wake up and smell the dirty money.

That’s the message federal regulators are sending to the real estate industry in Miami and other high-priced housing markets,

The U.S. Treasury Department announced it would extend and expand a temporary initiative designed to uncover criminals laundering money through real estate. The decree targets secretive shell companies — corporations that don’t have to reveal their true owners — buying luxury homes. The feds have already renewed the rules twice since announcing them in January 2016,

But this time, there’s a big difference — and it’s putting Miami’s struggling condo market under even more scrutiny.

The rules, previously so limited in scope that they applied only to a few hundred deals, will now cover every big-ticket cash transaction by shell companies in seven major markets. They are the South Florida counties of Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach; all five boroughs of New York City; San Antonio, Texas; Honolulu (included in the order for the first time); and Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco.

“This is going to gather much more information,” said Andrew Ittleman, a South Florida attorney who specializes in anti-money-laundering laws.

There’s been speculation about whether the administration of President Donald Trump, a former real estate developer, would double down on an initiative pushed by Obama-era officials. But the new policy shows Trump’s Treasury digging even deeper into the murky world of luxury real estate.

The end result: It’s going to get a lot harder for everyone from drug dealers to Latin American politicians to foreign royalty to shield purchases of U.S. condos and mansions from law enforcement.

The federal decree comes at a bad time for Miami real estate. Overbuilding and a slump in foreign buyers are hurting sales. The average sales price for luxury condo units in Miami Beach fell 21 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2017, according to a report from brokerage Douglas Elliman. Two-thirds of those sales were cash.

The rules kick in at different price points depending on the market. In South Florida, they apply to shell companies buying homes for $1 million or more with cash.

“This will help a market that has long neglected the amount of criminal activity taking place in the condo sector,” said Jack McCabe, a South Florida real estate analyst.

But Peter Zalewski, founder of the real estate advisory company Cranespotters, thinks the government is moving too slowly — and not going far enough.

“If you’re closing a $10 million sale and you stand to make $1 million on the deal, that’s a pretty big carrot,” Zalewski said. “And there’s no fear of a government stick, because there isn’t one in place.”

Bark Or Bite?

Critics dismissed Treasury’s original anti-money laundering rules — first deployed in Miami-Dade and Manhattan last year — as so narrow that they were practically toothless.

That’s because only less common methods of cash payments such as money orders, personal checks and hard currency had to be reported. But the latest order includes wire transfers, which are electronic exchanges of money between banks. In most home sales that don’t involve bank loans, money is sent from buyers to sellers through wire transfers. Regulators were missing out on a huge swath of transactions.

“It exempted most people from disclosure,” said Alan Lips, a partner at Miami accounting firm Gerson Preston. “In today’s world, people wire money.”

Until an act of Congress earlier this summer, the Treasury agency behind the initiative, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), did not have the authority to monitor wire transfers.

John Tobon, who leads a team of Department of Homeland Security investigators in South Florida, said the move is a crucial first step in allowing law enforcement to monitor funds moving electronically. After the first order, his agents observed home buyers immediately come up with “countermeasures” to avoid the disclosure requirements, including the use of wire transfers, Tobon said.

“Wire transfers were wide open” for abuse by criminals, “and no one was looking at them,” Toban said. “Now, we’re going to be able to identify companies and individuals that we had no idea about in the past.”

FinCEN is targeting cash home deals because it says they are most susceptible to money laundering. Cash transactions generally don’t involve heavy bank vetting. When banks give out mortgages, they are required to background their customers; professionals in the real estate industry are exempt from those responsibilities, although that could be changing.

Naughty Or Nice

As part of FinCEN’s latest push, the agency has told real estate industry professionals they should be on the lookout for suspicious activity from their clients.

“The misuse of shell companies to launder money is a systemic concern for law enforcement and regulatory agencies,” the agency wrote in an advisory to real estate agents, brokers, lawyers and other industry players.

It also encouraged them to report suspicious activity involving clients. Warning signs of bad behavior include clients willing to blindly overpay or lose money on a deal; the purchase of properties with “no regard” for their condition or location; funding that far exceeds a client’s known wealth; and clients asking for unwarranted secrecy or for records to be altered.

David Weinstein, a former federal prosecutor in South Florida who now practices white collar criminal defense, called the advisory “heavy-handed.”

“FinCEN is asking people who are not financial institutions and have no outright obligations to become an arm of the government, to become informants for them,” Weinsten said, “They’re sending a not-so-subtle message: We want you to tell us what’s going on. The implication is that if you don’t do this, we’re going to come after you and start squeezing you and say in our eyes you should have known what was going on. You should have vetted this money.”

Although real estate professionals aren’t required to set up compliance programs, no one is allowed to “willfully” turn a blind eye to money laundering, according to federal law. Weinstein recommended that realty firms consider implementing basic compliance programs.

Ron Shuffield, CEO of EWM Realty International, says the new requirement means closing agents must confirm the name and address of beneficial owners with a 25 percent stake in a corporation or limited liability company via a legal form of ID, such as a passport or driver’s license.

“There’s no legitimate buyer who’s going to feel uncomfortable with this,” Shuffield said.

The degree to which suspect money fuels Miami’s luxe real estate market is debated. But real estate crops up in case after case involving illicit funds. The release of the massive trove of offshore files known as the Panama Papers showed how easily offshore money moves into Miami real estate. The flood of cash has helped raise home prices far beyond what most locals can afford.

In FinCEN’s advisory, the agency highlighted several cases showing the threat posed by money laundering. One example cited was Venezuela’s vice president, Tareck El Aissami, and his associate, Samark López Bello. Both were sanctioned by U.S. authorities for their alleged involvement in narco-trafficking. López Bello owns three Brickell condos valued at nearly $7 million.

Tobon, of Homeland Security, said roughly 50 percent of his investigations involve money laundering through real estate.

The new order takes effect on Sept. 22 and expires on March 20, 2018. It could eventually be made permanent and expanded nationwide. The Washington, D.C., bureau of the Herald’s parent company, McClatchy, broke the news that the order would be extended Tuesday.

Achilles’ Heel

The FinCEN initiative — called a geographic targeting order — was designed to target the Achilles’ heel of American anti-money-laundering laws: weak transparency rules for limited liability corporations.

In many states, including Florida, it’s possible to set up an anonymous company and use it to buy a pricey mansion or condo. Offshore companies can be used for the same purpose. That’s catnip to criminals who don’t want anyone asking where they got the cash.

FinCEN changed the game by requiring title insurers — which are involved in almost all real estate transactions — to pierce the veil of shell companies and determine who really owns them. The information is not made public.

Because of the limitations of the original rules, roughly 240 transactions in the target markets were reported to regulators over 12 months, according to FinCEN data. But 30 percent of those sales were linked to people who’d been separately reported for suspicious activity by financial institutions.

In Miami-Dade, 16 of 32 reported deals were linked to suspicious buyers.

“They’re going to capture a lot more activity now,” said Jason Chorlins, a risk advisor at Miami accounting firm Kaufman Rossin. “The majority of this activity is done via wire transfer.”

 

Source: Bradenton Herald

A federal program that has help fund dozens of big new South Florida business projects over the past decade by swapping U.S. visas and green cards for foreign investment dollars is teetering on the brink of political extinction, according to its supporters.

The EB-5 visa program, which by the estimate of the investment community has funneled more than $18 billion in overseas cash into U.S. business development since 2008 — including hundreds of millions of dollars in Florida — will expire on Sept. 30 unless Congress renews it.

Some of the ongoing high-profile projects that are using EB-5 funds include Florida East Coast Industries’ eagerly awaited Brightline MiamiCentral, the mixed-use downtown Miami station for the upcoming All Aboard Florida passenger rail service. A deal for $130 million in EB-5 funds will go toward the plaza’s 180,000 square feet of retail space.

SkyRise Miami, the ambitious 1,000-foot skyscraper/tourist attraction planned by developer Jeff Berkowitz to launch in 2020, would also include EB-5 funds as part of its $430 million budget.

But the EB-5 faces congressional critics who want to amend the program into oblivion or even it kill it outright. And even to get a fair hearing, it must compete for attention with the always-contentious federal budget, President Trump’s tax-reform proposal and a score of other high-priority items with upcoming deadlines.

“I think Sept. 30 is the drop-dead for renewal,” said Miami immigration attorney Tammy Fox-Issicoff, who frequently works with EB-5 investors. “And I mean that’s the drop-dead date for a full renewal. We’ve had a number of short extensions. That’s killing the program’s credibility with foreign investors who might like to join. Nobody wants to put half a million bucks into something that might be gone in three months.”

What is EB-5?

EB-5 visas were first created in 1990 as part of a larger congressional reform of immigration policy. They allow a foreigner who invests $1 million in a project that will generate at least 10 long-term jobs to get a visa and a green card if the project is completed. The required investment drops to $500,000 if it’s directed at a high-unemployment area.

But EB-5s didn’t really take off until 2009, when the Great Recession dried up commercial lending around the United States. As banks and other traditional credit sources retrenched, businesses started using EB-5 investment to patch the holes they left.

“As a result of those absences, you had to look for alternative sources of financing,” said Michael Conaghan, chief operating officer at Fort Partners, the developer of the Four Seasons Hotel and Private Residences at the Surf Club in Surfside. Conaghan is raising up to $200 million in EB-5 money to build a Four Seasons hotel-residence in Fort Lauderdale. “Since then, EB-5 has proven to be a good source of financing for projects. It also brings new people and new capital and new jobs to the country. A lot of other visa programs focus on people who are already here.”

EB-5 critics say it’s an inefficient investment tool, a needless subsidy to wealthy developers, and an easy target for manipulation and corruption.

“What it mostly does is it saves money for a lot of folks who are already rich and are just getting richer,” said David North, a senior fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think-tank that’s harshly critical of immigration.

But what nobody disputes is that from beer joints to giant train lines, EB-5 funds are fueling economic development and local businesses in South Florida at an increasing rate. According to the latest figures available from the industry trade organization Invest in the USA, EB-5 investment throughout the state shot up from $10,500,000 in 2011 to $150,500,000 in the fiscal year 2013.

The precise impact of the EB-5 is nearly impossible to measure because the government keeps few statistics on the program. No one knows exactly how many EB-5 projects have succeeded, how many failed, or how many jobs have been created.

But the money definitely ripples through other economic measures. Invest in the USA estimates that the total gross domestic product contributed to Florida by EB-5 projects grew from $15 million to $179 million. State and local tax revenue went from $858,822 to $10,918,299.

Mezzanine Funding

Usually, EB-5 money serves as what developers call “mezzanine funding,” which fills the gap between what banks will finance and a project’s total cost.

“In a typical project, the developer is going to have some of his own money involved, maybe 20 to 25 percent of the total cost,” said Ron Klasko, a Philadelphia lawyer who has worked on 10 EB-5 projects in South Florida and hundreds across the country. Another 40 percent or so will come from a construction loan — what’s called the senior loan. And the other 35 percent is the mezzanine loan.”

Mezzanine loans obtained from a bank or other traditional lender might charge 14 to 18 percent. But because EB-5 investors are interested in getting their green cards, they are willing to accept a tiny fraction of that, often between 1 and 3 percent interest.

Funding for these projects is usually put together by federally designated business enterprises known as EB-5 centers that act as conduits for the program’s investment money. As recently as 2010, there were less than 100 EB-5 centers around the United States; now there are more than 850. Although they finance everything from farms to body shops, most of their money goes into real estate projects. In Florida, that has included everything from small businesses to mammoth developments.

Doug Rudolph, the CEO of Tapco Restaurant Group, says its first two Tap 42 Craft Beer Bar & Kitchen restaurants — the Boca Raton location, which opened in 2015, and the Coral Gables spot, which opened in 2016 — each used $2.25 million in EB-5 money, or 80 percent of their total construction costs.

The group’s other two locations — one in Midtown, which opened in June, and an upcoming spot at the Aventura Mall expansion — used $2.5 million each. Rudolph said the three existing restaurants have created “three to four times” the number of jobs required under EB-5 rules. That number varies depending on the size of the investment.

“People who want to invest in businesses that are creating jobs can touch and feel and meet us,” Rudolph said. “They can come into one of our restaurants and eat there, so they know exactly what they’re investing in. Most EB-5 investors intend to live in the same city as their investment, and they like the idea of being part of a local business. They feel closer to their communities.”

The $200 million mixed-use Hollywood Circle development, currently under construction on a 3.2 acre lot on U.S. 1 and Hollywood Blvd., will be composed of a trio of residential towers that will include a boutique hotel, gourmet restaurant, parking garage and a Publix supermarket. The budget includes $109 million in EB-5 funds.

The project is being developed by the Gold Coast Florida Regional Center, which was created in 2010 as a way to fill the void left by the departure of Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley and other big financial players from the real estate scene after the 2008 recession.

“We buy money just like plywood for development,” said Charles Abele, a founding partner of Gold Coast. “It’s one of the commodities needed to do what we do, so we decided to raise our own equity. EB-5 serves as a sweetener for every deal.”

Unexpected Benefit

Developers of the 60-story Paramount condo tower at the Miami Worldcenter mixed-use project under construction in downtown Miami say that EB-5 visas have been not a key element in their financing more than $50 million of it — but they say they have become an unexpected marketing tool for the project.

“Four of the 10 units we sold in June went to someone who came to the sales center intending to buy an EB-5 and bought a condo instead,” said Peggy Fucci, president and CEO of the real estate firm OneWorld Properties, the exclusive broker on the Paramount tower. Potential EB-5 investors have pockets deep enough to buy a condo at the tower, where prices start at $700,000.

Curiously, despite the tumultuous state of the U.S. debate over immigration, very little of the criticism of the EB-5 concerns the visas themselves or the 10,000 foreign investors and their family members (the annual cap on EB-5 immigration set by law) who use them to get into the United States each year.

“Most people don’t realize that a million immigrants come into the country each year,” said North, a strong critic of the EB-5. “In the context of a number like that, 10,000 is nothing, a drop in the bucket.”

A much bigger sticking point is what nearly everybody, including the most enthusiastic backers of the EB-5, admits is the program’s inefficient administration by a lumbering immigration bureaucracy that knows lots about visas but very little about cash flow, capitalization or anything else that goes into real estate development.

“The immigration component of the EB-5 program is trivial,” said Philadelphia attorney Klasko. “The EB-5 program doesn’t belong with the immigration service. Immigration officials don’t normally deal with reviewing securities offerings or economic reports or business plans. It creates problems at several levels. When you’re talking about the pace of business — especially in real estate development — it just doesn’t make any sense for immigration officials to say, ‘File your plan with us today and we’ll review it in a year and half.’ That’s not very realistic. But that’s the reality.”

An Uneasy Mix

The EB-5s uneasy mix of politics, business and immigration can lead to practices that are dubious in all three areas. One of the things most frequently denounced is what EB-5 players call “gerrymandering,” after the legislative practice of creating grotesque-looking districts to give one party or another an election advantage.

In the EB-5 version of gerrymandering, developers use tortuous geographic logic to link luxury developments in upscale metropolitan areas with blighted, poverty-stricken districts miles away. That allows them to get access to EB-5 money that’s intended for high-unemployment areas. Because the high-unemployment EB-5 investments can be smaller ($500,000 instead of $1 million), they are more plentiful.

The linkage is possible because the EB-5 law permits the developers to create so-called targeted employment areas, without regard to how large or misshapen they are, as long as the territory consists of adjacent U.S. Census tracts (small areas that are home from 1,200 to 8,000 people).

“We need more regulation on this,” said Rodrigo Azpurua, head of the Riviera Point Development Group, a Broward firm that has raised more than $53 million in EB-5 funds since 2012 to partially fund projects such as the Riviera Point Business Center Doral and the Radisson Red Miami Airport. “Right now, you can pretty easily build a line of Census tracts from Liberty City, where the unemployment rate is 20 percent or so, to Brickell, where it’s zero, and use the Liberty City unemployment to justify a luxury hotel in Brickell.”

Azpurua’s Brickell-to-Liberty City example is, if anything, understated. A 2015 lawsuit in Texas brought to light a targeted employment area that stretched through 190 Census tracts and five counties to link the battered, unemployment-plagued city of Brownsville with a planned upscale hotel in the city of Laredo, 200 miles away.

Not everyone agrees that the Where’s-Waldo? games with Census tracts are a problem. Immigration attorney Fox-Isicoff argues that the location of a project has little connection with where it will create jobs.

“I work on Brickell, but I live in North Miami,” Fox-Isicoff said. “I must drive through 12 or 15 or 20 Census tracts on my way to work each day. Same thing for most of the people in my office.”

And geography becomes even more irrelevant, she says, when the subject is so-called induced jobs — say, the people working in distant factories who manufacture the brick and steel and window glass that go into the construction projects.

“Those are all allowed to count toward the 10 jobs that must be generated by an EB-5 investment,” Fox-Isicoff said. “Does that mean every EB-5 project has to be built next door to a brick factory?”

The Gerrymandering Situation

Others, however, believe that EB-5 gerrymandering is part of a larger problem — that the allure of a potential visa makes investors look past red flags that something is awry. In recent years, EB-5 investors have been victimized in staggering corruption cases in Vermont and South Dakota in which the middlemen packaging their loans ran off well over $100 million of their funds or lost it in unauthorized investments.

The investors not only lost their money (a total of well over $100 million) but their visas, which aren’t awarded unless an investment program is successfully completed.

“It’s true that you can have a Bernie Madoff situation in any investment, with crooks taking your money,” said North. “But the likelihood in an EB-5 investment is greater because the intent of the investment is greater. A bank making a loan is looking for a good investment with solid security. EB-5 investors would like to have their money back eventually, but what they really want is the visas. And they don’t pay much attention to anything else.”

Fox-Isicoff agreed: “Inherent in the EB-5 program is the element of risk. The element of, ‘This may not work. You may not be paid back.’ People lose sight of that fact.”

The bureaucratic delays in the EB-5 program only make matters worse.

“Developers can’t wait two years before they start getting their money from investors, so a lot of times people are making their investment before the government has even reviewed the project,” noted Klasko.

The clumsiness of the EB-5 as an economic tool has led some to suggest that it be replaced with a program that simply sells a certain number of U.S. green cards, just as some two dozen other countries around the world offer citizenship for cash.

The government could use the receipts to create jobs programs wherever they were needed, not just in the high-profile urban areas that developers favor. (A pair of 2016 studies by New York University scholars of the 52 largest EB-5 projects in America since 2009 showed that nearly 40 percent of their money went to a single borough of New York City: Manhattan.)

“If we’re going to prostitute our visa process, let’s get a lot more money for it,” said North. “I’d run an auction. Charge whatever the market would bear. Let the government keep the money instead of giving it to big developers.”

EB-5 Opponents

That’s not one of the proposals on the table in Congress. Those range from killing the EB-5 visa outright to drastically raising its price — which might kill it anyway, many EB-5 supporters say. And although President Trump’s aversion to immigration is well known, the proposals to curtail the EB-5 originated well before his election.

Before President Obama left office, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the EB-5 program through its United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office, proposed a series of changes that would raise the minimum EB-5 investment from $500,000 to $1.35 million.

“If the cost goes above $1 million, that’s going to seriously impact the program,” said attorney Randy Sidlosca, a partner in the EB-5 Immigration Investor Program Practice at Cozen O’Connor in Miami. “People just don’t want to part with a million dollars for five or six years, which is how long it usually takes to get your money back from an EB-5.” Sidlosca favors a compromise increase to $850,000, which is gaining support in the EB-5 community. “We can live with that,” he said. “Change is going to come, it’s inevitable, and we need to accept that.”

Compromise is possible, said Ronald Fieldstone, one of the most active EB-5 attorneys in Miami, because the fight about EB-5s is about money rather than ideology, a subject Congress knows how to negotiate.

“This isn’t about Trump and people who don’t like Trump, or Republicans and Democrats, or pro-immigration and anti-immigration,” Fieldstone said. “It’s about rural versus urban. The most combative opponents of EB-5 are people like Iowa’s Republican U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, whose state gets almost none of the EB-5 money because of the way the program has been administered. … I think this can get worked out.”

 

Source: Miami Herald

The city of Miami inched one step closer Thursday to a multimillion-dollar quid pro quo that would land it a new administrative building and parking garage, while facilitating the construction of a $465 million mixed-use project on the site of its current headquarters on the north bank of the Miami River.

With a swift vote Thursday morning, the City Commission authorized the appointment of a special estate counsel in the city’s proposed deal to lease its riverside administrative center to property developer Adler Group in exchange for the construction of a new building and parking garage elsewhere in the city.

Under the agreement, the developer would pay the city a projected $335 million over the length of a 90-year ground lease on the city’s two-acre property through rent and a cut of sales. That adds up to a present-day value of about $70 million. The deal was proposed last year by an Adler Group affiliate, Lancelot Miami River.

City employees would remain in the building at 444 SW Second Ave., which formerly belonged to Florida Power and Light, until the construction of its new headquarters in 2020.

Rendering of Adler Group’s Riverside Nexus Central. Studio X Architects

For Adler Group, the land swap is part of a larger plan to erect a sprawling mixed-use project on the river dubbed Nexus Riverside Central. The project would be built on the city site and a neighboring 1.5 acre parcel. It would include three 36-story residential towers with 1,350 units, a 150-room hotel and 30,000 square feet of shops and restaurants.

Despite Thursday’s vote, the proposal is far from set in stone. Even if a deal is reached by commissioners, who authorized hiring the law firm without much discussion, the question would then be put on the November ballot and at the mercy of voters.

The deal appeared to be headed for the shelf before Weiss Serota Helfman Cole & Bierman, a Coral Gables law firm, was chosen from a pool of 16 candidates. Commissioners first rejected the city attorney’s choice of Shutts & Bowen, raising questions about whether there would be enough time to get a deal together and on the November ballot.

Commissioners said they were uncomfortable that Shutts & Bowen, a Miami firm, represents a plaintiff suing the city, and also that former commissioner Marc Sarnoff currently works as an attorney at the firm.

“It’s the responsibility of the special counsel to ensure that the city gets a favorable deal,” said Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado.

A review of the proposal last year noted that the city would pay up to $123 million for its new 375,000-square-foot office and 1,200-car garage, a roughly $50 million gap from what Adler will pay to lease the riverside property. Administrators say early negotiations quickly cut into the difference, although the most recent development agreement, crafted back in November, doesn’t specify where those numbers stand.

Weiss Serota will help to negotiate further. The commission in a prior resolution voted that when the city undergoes a major real estate deal, a special counsel is needed to ensure the city receives a fair deal, and Florida law states that any long-term waterfront lease requires a voter referendum.

Regalado said he was hopeful that a deal would be reached and that a motion would be put to voters in November.

“The city’s riverside administrative center, located on highly sought-after riverfront land, lacks adequate parking and poses a challenge for residents to access,” Regalado said. “It’s not client-friendly.”

If approved and favorably voted on, the new administrative headquarters would likely be built in one of three spots: near Marlins Park in Little Havana, behind Lyric Theater in Overtown or inside the seven-acre Link at Douglas complex that Adler is building at the Douglas Road Metrorail Station.

 

Source: Miami Herald

Despite the condo market slowdown, developer Shahab Karmely is confident his project and the Miami River are poised for big growth.

Click photo to view video of Shahab Karmely discussing the Miami River and One River Point at the TRD Broward Showcase and Forum panel by TRD’s Alistair Gardiner

In a post-panel interview, Karmely and The Real Deal South Florida’s Managing Editor Ina Cordle discussed One River Point and the river at TRD‘s Third Annual Broward Real Estate Showcase & Forum in April.

Presales at One River Point are about to pass the 18 percent to 20 percent mark. Buyers there are mostly from South America, but also from Georgia, New York and Canada.

“We have headwinds – not us, just everybody else,” Karmely said. “On the other hand, we are financially very secure. We have no financing.”

The Real Deal previously reported that Karmely’s silent partner is Daniel Loeb, the billionaire investor who runs one of the most prominent activist hedge funds, Third Point LLC. Karmely’s KAR Properties has spent more than $112 million on acquisitions along the River, in Wynwood and in Hallandale Beach since 2013, and more on pre-develoment costs.

Karmely was part of a panel discussion on the economics of new development amid a new administration and continuing global market fluctuation.

To watch the panel in full, click here.

 

Source: The Real Deal

The Sears at Aventura Mall will close this summer and the site will be developed into a mixed-use project. 

Rendering of Esplanade at Aventura

Sears, at 19505 Biscayne Boulevard, will begin its liquidation sale at the end of April and close by mid-July, the South Florida Business Journal reported. The landlord, Seritage Growth Properties, will break ground on Esplanade at Aventura, with 215,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and entertainment space, later this year. Aventura approved the site plan in December.

Seritage purchased 235 Sears and Kmart stores from Sears Holdings Corp. earlier this year. Under terms of the sale, Seritage recaptured the property, which allows the real estate investment trust to develop the site. It has 224 properties leased to Sears Holdings operating under Sears or the Kmart brand.

In November, the REIT settled a lawsuit that it filed against the owners of Aventura Mall to stop the shopping center’s expansion plans, which are underway.

The mall, owned by Turnberry Associates and Simon Property Group, plans to open a new three-level wing in November with Topshop Topman and Zara, all part of Aventura Mall’s 315,000-square-foot expansion.

 

Source: The Real Deal

Another new office building was just announced for Coconut Grove, marking the second in recent weeks after nearly 30 years.

CocoWalk owners Federal Realty Investment Trust, Grass River Property and Comras Company plan to raze the eastern building on Grand Avenue and Virginia Street and build a five-story, 73,000-square-foot Class A building on the site, Grass River principal Tom Roth told The Real Deal.

Just two weeks ago, Terra Group and Mayfair Real Estate Advisors announced plans to convert a parking garage at 2860 Oak Avenue into a mixed-use office building, citing the demand for office product and lack of available space in the neighborhood. Together, the two projects will add 140,000 square feet of office space to Coconut Grove.

“We believe there’s plenty of pent-up demand to serve both projects,” Roth said, adding that he believes CocoWalk is a better location.

One CocoWalk, designed by Beame Architectural Partnership, is the first phase of redevelopment for CocoWalk, which was purchased by the partnership in May 2015 in a deal valued at $87.5 million. The once-popular Mediterranean-style outdoor shopping mall has fallen out of style in past years. Roth said plans for phase two, which will focus on retail, will be announced in the coming months.

The office building, geared toward global brands, media and technology companies, creative and financial firms, will be delivered in mid-2019. It will have four floors of office space above a level of ground-floor retail space, plus a rooftop terrace and event space with full views of the neighborhood. CocoWalk will set aside about 250 parking spaces for its office users, which breaks down to 3.4 spaces per 1,000 square feet, Roth said.

“We didn’t buy CocoWalk to keep it as it is today. We really feel it needs to blend better with the rest of Coconut Grove,” Roth told TRD.

 

Source:  The Real Deal

Westpoint Retail Plaza

Castle Real Estate Enterprises has engaged Ven-American Real Estate, Inc. to exclusively manage and lease Westpoint Retail Plaza, an immaculate 16,655-square foot neighborhood center, located at 10101-10251 W. Commercial Blvd. in Tamarac.

Tenants at the center include Dunkin Donuts, Subway, AT&T, Rotelli Pizza & Pasta, CareSpot Urgent Care, Gentle Dentistry, Brightway Insurance and Liberty Tax.

Under Ven-American Real Estate’s management, Subway held a Grand Re-Opening, unveiling a new mouth-watering store redesign focused on integrating technology into all aspects of the restaurant design.

Only one of every five Subway shops in the entire United States will feature this design, which includes:

 

  • All new décor, equipment and design
  • New self-ordering kiosks, allowing guests to “skip the line” and get in and out quicker
  • New touchscreen fountain beverage machine with flavor-customization capability
  • New digital menu display
  • New coffee and specialty coffee program using freshly-ground coffee beans
  • New Panini sandwich press
  • New sauces and toppings

Subway’s goal with the new design is to create a more welcoming and comfortable environment for “this generation’s consumer” while continuing its dedication to delivering the same delicious, fresh and healthy food products the brand has provided since 1965.

Andrew Kruss

“We are very honored to be a part of this technology-centric Subway store concept,” commented Andrew Kruss, Director of Commercial Services for Ven-American Real Estate, Inc.  “It’s the first one in the entire state of Florida, and being a part of any ‘first’ is always exciting,” he added.

The shopping center has also begun a “redesign” of its own.  The property has recently been freshly painted. In addition, plans call for an upgrade to the lighting throughout property – not only for energy efficiency purposes, but to provide a better quality of light and coverage, as well as reducing maintenance costs.

“Our goal is to continue to make tenants and visitors feel safe and make the property more aesthetically pleasing at night,” said Kruss.

Andrew Kruss is a Ygrene Certified Contractor and has helped many clients improve their energy and water efficiency. Projects include lighting, HVAC, roofing, energy controls and impact windows. At Monarch Commerce Center in Miramar, Florida, another Ven-American Real Estate, Inc.-managed property, Kruss was able to reduce energy consumption by approximately 40% while improving light coverage and quality.

“We have also reduced lighting related maintenance costs by approximately $5,700 per year,” Kruss explained.

Andrew Kruss has owned, managed, leased and sold commercial property for thirty years. He is a practical, solution-oriented, hands-on manager who believes in efficiency in property management and energy sustainability solutions.

Kruss added, “We look forward to working with the tenants and Castle Real Estate Enterprises to make the property more attractive, efficient and productive for the entire community’s benefit.”

The shopping center, conveniently located along the Sunrise/Tamarac city boundary, features 150 parking spaces, AT&T Fiber and Comcast Cable, as well as excellent visibility facing busy Commercial Blvd. cross streets Nob Hill Road & Hiatus Road, with 50,000 vehicles per day traveling between the neighborhood thoroughfares. The property is also located adjacent to heavily-traveled Sawgrass Expressway.

Year-end surges in the office, industrial and retail sectors foreshadow robust economic growth across South Florida for 2017, commercial real estate experts say.

A lack of new supply pushed office rents higher, particularly in the downtown corridors, and the optimism displayed by businesses looking to expand is prompting developers to strongly consider shovels in the ground after a decade of inactivity.

West City Partners has proposed a 500,000-square-foot office building in downtown Fort Lauderdale, although the project isn’t expected to break ground until an anchor tenant commits.

The Stiles real estate firm is in talks with Broward College for a ground lease at the two-building site on Las Olas Boulevard. Stiles would tear down the buildings and replace them with a 350,000-square-foot office tower, said Doug Eagon, the developer’s vice chairman.

“It is time to introduce the next generation of office space into the downtown market,” Eagon said.

Last year, Stiles paid $13.1 million for the Bank of America building next to Broward College.

“The firm is considering its options, with retail and residential likely,” Eagon said.

Meanwhile, demand is soaring for warehouse and distribution space as e-commerce suppliers struggle to keep up with online retail sales, according to a report from the Colliers  International real estate firm.

In the fourth quarter of 2016, Broward’s industrial vacancy rate plummetted to 4.4 percent from 6.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2015, the Colliers data show. Palm Beach County’s vacancy dropped to a nine-year low of 4.2 percent.

Boca Raton and Jupiter had the county’s two lowest industrial vacancy rates, at 1.2 percent and 1.5 percent, respectively. Those two markets also had the two highest rents — $14.53 a square foot in Boca Raton and $11.43 a square foot in Jupiter.

“Palm Beach County has more than 422,000 square feet of industrial space under construction, the majority of it at McCraney Property Co.’s Turpike Business Park adjacent to Florida’s Turnpike at Belvedere Road,” Colliers said.

In Broward, Butters Construction and Development and Bristol Group Inc. are planning a 925,000-square-foot business park at the site of the former Deerfield Country Club off Interstate 95 and Hillsboro Boulevard.

Tom Capocefalo, senior managing director for the Savills Studley commercial real estate brokerage in Miami, said the tri-county region is geographically positioned to easily ship goods domestically or internationally to the end users.

“We’re finding that the South Florida marketplace is one of the top-tier distribution markets in the country,” Capocefalo said. “It’s incredible, the pace of it.”

“Industial developers are moving north into Palm Beach County because the county has more available property than either Broward or Miami-Dade,” said Ken Krasnow, executive managing director for Colliers in South Florida, said

“Land is a scarcity,” Krasnow said. “We’re not making any more of it.”

“Palm Beach County also had a banner year in retail, with more than 1 million square feet of space leased – the highest level since 2006 and nearly double the 515,050 of 2015,” Colliers said.

Broward totaled 1.4 million square feet in new retail leases, its best showing in a decade. The first phase of Dania Pointe, an $800 million shopping and entertainment center, is expected to open this year just east of Interstate 95 at Stirling and Bryan roads in Dania Beach.

Colliers said small blocks of space in the 2,000-square-foot range are most in demand as Broward tenants seek to control costs in an era of rising rents and the growth of e-commerce. With smaller spaces more in vogue, the challenge for retail landlords this year will be to find tenants for the available “big box” spaces across the region, market observers say.

Sports Authority filed for bankruptcy and went out of business, closing 13 stores across South Florida and auctioning 10 others. In January, Macy’s said it would close stores nationwide, including one at CityPlace in West Palm Beach.

“Landlords will first try to find a tenant to take the space in its current configuration,” said Peter Reed, managing principal at Commercial Florida Realty Services in Boca Raton. “When those efforts are exhausted, they’ll have to ask themselves, ‘How do I repurpose this?’ In some cases, they’ll be able to multi-tenant it, but in other cases the best thing may be to scrape it and do something different.”

 

Source: SunSentinel

Crescent Heights is preparing a Special Area Plan in Edgewater under the Miami 21 zoning code, according to the Herald.

The developer is planning a “whole community” that will include “a little bit of everything,” Russell Galbut told the paper.

Galbut confirmed that he is in contract to buy several Edgewater properties owned by The Village, a rehab facility which will have three years to vacate the property. The contract includes several properties, including 3180 Biscayne Boulevard.

He doesn’t expect the development to happen “this cycle,” but said that he doesn’t think anything is growing faster than the Brickell to Edgewater area.

If combined with Crescent Height’s 4.6-acre holdings at 3000 Biscayne, the developer’s holdings will be close to the 9-acre Special Area Plan threshold, and would span both sides of Biscayne Boulevard.

 

Source:  The Next Miami