Miami-Dade office rents rise 8.4% as leasing slips to 1.1 million square feet

Miami-Dade County's office availability fell 1.2 percentage points over the past year to 14.6 percent, while average asking rents rose 8.4 percent to $68.50 a square foot, a Savills report covered by Commercial Observer shows. Leasing volume slipped to 1.1 million square feet in the quarter from about 1.3 million in the prior one, and the county's shortage of large blocks—only about a dozen options above 50,000 square feet on the market—is cited in the report as a possible constraint on economic growth.

The activity that did get done split between the two ends of the market. Airport West, the cheaper submarket around the airport, accounted for 28 percent of leasing and Brickell took 25.2 percent, a division Savills reads as the pandemic-era bifurcation of a county courting global business while its longtime tenants relocate to cheaper space. Asking rents in Brickell and Coconut Grove average more than $90 a square foot, against the $68.50 county average, and the report ties those relocations of established tenants to cost pressure.

Brickell still signs the expansions that set the top of the rent range. Google added 10,000 square feet at 1450 Brickell Avenue, bringing its footprint there to 45,000 square feet, and Spain's Banco Sabadell renewed nearly 50,000 square feet at the 1111 Brickell tower nearby—retention and modest-growth deals in a submarket that supplies about a quarter of county leasing while commanding rents above $90 a square foot.

Santander's Brickell skyscraper and Ken Griffin's are both under construction, and the report puts both likely past 2029 before completion, which leaves the county's trophy inventory roughly as it is for three more years. Brickell rents carry that scarcity support for another three years, and a corporate tenant needing a very large floor plate still faces about a dozen options with nothing new likely to arrive this decade.

Griffin's Miami commitment extends past that tower, as this publication has covered: the $1.1 billion Wynwood purchase, where seller Moishe Mana told The Real Deal that a Carnegie Mellon campus plan won him over after he initially refused to sell the 30-acre site. Development capital paying for permission to build is the trade the two projects share, and in Miami-Dade that permission is worth more than usual while new supply sits beyond 2029. The fourth quarter should sharpen the picture: whether leasing recovers toward the prior period's 1.3 million square feet, or the county keeps posting rent gains of this size on shrinking volume.