Israel’s Mishorim Development Group is preparing to develop a mixed-use project after closing on the purchase of a parking garage.

Mishorim paid $18,250,000 for the Suntrust Annex garage. Crocker Partners was the seller. Real estate broker Shai Ben Ami represented Mishorim in the transaction. Mishorim, has holdings in Israel, the U.S. and Canada, and is led by CEO Gil Blutrich.

According to Ben Ami, Mishorim has retained the services of Kobi Karp to design a mixed-use project for the site. It will include hotel, residential, and “great retail.” The 247,000-square-foot garage, located at 255 Northeast First Street, is situated on a 37,500-square foot lot.

The property is across from the Yotel development site, and a block and a half away from the Waldorf Astoria development site. Buildable square footage for the Mishorim site totals 1.35 million square feet, which includes zoning for 860 residential units.

Blutrich and Ben Ami also own the 4,350-square-foot retail space at the 37-story Centro tower nearby. They secured two leases for that space five months after purchasing it at $75.00 per square foot, which is believed to be among the highest retail rents for Downtown Miami.

 

Source: The Next Miami

On a cramped corner lot in South Miami, a venture backed by a national real estate group has won city permission to build a compact house out of two shipping containers and reserve it for a low-income buyer.

The team behind the planned 480-square-foot house sees it as a launching pad for a quick system of producing modular, attractive housing that works well on the extremely small lots that are scattered across Miami-Dade County.

“There are these shotgun lots everywhere” in low-income neighborhoods, said Evan Fancher, director of the South Miami anti-blight district that’s backing the South Miami project. “There are these right-of-ways and weird corner lots, and no builder will touch them.”

As Miami-Dade struggles with one of the country’s largest housing gaps between rich and poor, tiny lots could offer a small but steady fix. While the stakes are high for affordable-housing developers who compete for government dollars to build large high-rise complexes where thousands of people can live, spare lots offer the chance to create single-family homes one buyer at a time.

Cargo containers — bus-sized steel boxes plentiful in a port city like Miami — lend themselves to small-lot building. At the Little River Box Company, Gayle Zalduondo’s team has already cut 10 feet off two standard 40-foot cargo containers to fit into the confines of the 3,200-square-foot South Miami lot. The Miami Association of Realtors hired Little River Box to create the South Miami house as a test case in how cargo containers can make it easier to create affordable housing.

“We’re trying to figure out the barriers,” said Danielle Blake, head of government affairs for the Realtors group and the person running the project.

The two containers slated for the South Miami house can be assembled at the West Little River warehouse where Zalduondo and crew are already at work on a 40-foot temporary bar for a pop-up restaurant in Overtown. That’s next to a four-bedroom living space that’s set to be converted into a houseboat on the Miami River.

Upstairs in her office, there are plans for cargo containers stacked atop each other for a low-cost apartment building, and another set of cottages for a Doral developer who wants to create affordable teacher housing in the parking lot of a planned school.

“Right now, we’re doing one a week,” said Zalduondo, a welder who shifted from high-end furniture to cargo containers about five years ago. “We want to start doing one a day.”

Assembling and finishing the container homes in the warehouse make it easier to build on a cramped lot, since a construction crew doesn’t have to camp out on the land for months to build a traditional home. But the story behind this would-be South Miami cottage shows the challenges for the container-home option.

First, there’s red tape. The Miami Association of Realtors, which is covering some of the building costs, spent about 18 months before securing South Miami’s approval to assemble the containers into a one-bedroom, one-bath cottage on the 6100 block of 63rd Terrace. One review board required landscaping upgrades and other add-ons that the builders say added about $25,000 to the budget.

There’s also the challenge that creating homes out of cargo containers isn’t quite as cheap as people might think. Miami-Dade commissioners grumbled about the estimated $180,000 asking price for the South Miami container house when presented with the plan at a committee hearing this week.

“The idea is commendable, but the price is not affordable,” said Commissioner Joe Martinez, who represents the West Kendall area. “I think that’s way too expensive. Does it even include the land? Or is it just the shed?”

The capped sales price — the Realtors group said it would take less if no buyers qualified — includes the land, and would only be available to purchasers who earn less than $51,000 a year. That’s within the range of Miami-Dade’s workforce-housing program, which targets people who have a steady income but can’t afford a place to live. Under the county program, the land would include a requirement that it be sold only to workforce buyers in the future.

The overall price would still make it one of the cheapest houses in South Miami. A recent search of realtor.com found no single-family houses selling for less than $200,000 in South Miami. The closest to that price was an 800-square-foot “fixer-upper” marketed as an “opportunity to buy at a cheap price, renovate, rebuild,” then rent or sell “at top market.”

Even Miam-Dade’s own affordable-housing program lets builders sell homes on donated county surplus lots for up to $205,000. But those houses typically come with multiple bedrooms for families, rather than the couple or single occupant that’s the target for the South Miami container house.

Ariovistus Lundy’s Palmetto Homes builds single-family houses under Miami-Dade’s affordable-housing program, using surplus county lots. He has a house for sale on the 9600 block of Northwest 19th Avenue in Miami, and the asking price is the county maximum of $205,000. He’s expecting a quick sale.

“They can be sold before you even finish the house,” Lundy said. “There’s more people than affordable housing right now.”

The difference: That house on 19th Avenue has about 1,500 square feet of living space, enough for three of the cargo-container homes planned for South Miami. That makes the square-foot asking price about $136 for Lundy, versus $375 for the container home. The disparity can make it even harder to secure loans for low-income buyers, since banks typically use square-footage prices for appraisals.

Fancher, director of the South Miami Community Redevelopment Area, said his agency is ready to assist with grants to cover some of the down payment, which could bring the monthly mortgage cost below $1,200. A list of comparable homes provided by the Realtors group showed some nearby condos in the 500-square-foot range selling at close to the $180,000 price, but the one-bedroom houses starting at $300,000.

The next big hurdle for the Realtors group is to secure the land. Miami-Dade owns the 3,200-square-foot lot and first posted it on a list of surplus property available for purchase since 2015. There have been no buyers.

The County Commission’s Housing committee approved transferring it to the Realtors group at its Tuesday meeting, and a final vote is slated for later this year.

“You’re getting a lot of obstacles,” Commissioner Barbara Jordan told Blake and Zalduondo before voting to advance the proposal. “The more innovative we can be to take away obstacles, the better.”

Click here to view the Miami Herald news video ‘Little River Box Company Is Building Low-Cost Houses Out Of Shipping Containers’

 

Source: Miami Herald

Frank Cestero is in a sweet spot. The Puerto Rican gets to enjoy the warm, tropical weather of Palm Beach County in the US state of Florida, while the small company he works for is booming thanks to robust growth in the global renewable energy sector.

Cestero is the chief financial officer (CFO) of SolarTech Universal, headquartered in the coastal city of Riviera Beach. Founded in 2012, SolarTech‘s panels are made using advanced robotics and solar cell technology designed by the company’s European partner, Meyer Burger, a Swiss firm operating in Germany and Singapore.

Its cutting-edge equipment allows the green energy company to focus on the premium end of the market. That seems to be working out. SolarTech will be adding a second production line by the end of the year, creating an expected 70 new jobs in the process.

“Demand is robust,” said Cestero. “We’re very bullish over the next 24 months.”

Favorable Business Climate

Governments and businesses have increasingly set their sights on harnessing the power of the sun to meet their energy needs. Furthermore, government policy changes in response to climate change have created incentives and mandates at the local, state and national levels.

Technological improvements, meanwhile, have slashed solar power production costs, making it more accessible to commercial and residential customers. Demand for clean power has also been on the rise over the past several years, with consumers seeing the benefits of shifting to clean sources of energy and decentralized power distribution.

Against this backdrop, companies big and small are optimistic about the future. Market players like CED Greentech, a large US solar panel distributor and SolarTech customer, have increased their investments over the past couple of months.

“The market is pretty dynamic,” said Tristan Tedford, a CED Greentech account manager setting up shop in Pompano Beach, a city just north of Fort Lauderdale. “Module prices have dropped and you have an emerging electric vehicle market coming.”

The Trump Tariffs

The industry’s growth and increasing strategic significance, coupled with complaints from American solar manufacturers about unfair trade competition, were all a part of the reason why US President Donald Trump zeroed in on solar panels, among other products, for tariffs in early 2018.

“The tariff narrowed the price gap between the Chinese product and US product and by highlighting the US product, it has increased awareness of US-made products among end-users and middle-market buyers,” Cestero said.

He claims that by the end of this year SolarTech will be the only domestic manufacturer of exclusively US-made panels, with over 70 percent of its inputs sourced domestically. This is significant because it gives a niche player like SolarTech access to the lucrative public sector, as state and local governments strive to meet CO2-reduction targets by increasing public investment in green energy.

Industry Backlash

But some in the US solar industry have aggressively pushed back against Trump‘s tariffs. One example is SunPower, which is majority-owned by French oil giant Total. The San Jose-based company threatened to curtail its new capital investments and slash jobs if it didn’t receive an exemption from Trump‘s tariffs.

The company builds most of its solar products in Mexico and the Philippines and has argued that the millions of dollars it would pay in import duties threatened its growth plans. After months of lobbying the Trump administration, SunPower received an exemption from the tariffs, boosting the firm’s stock price.

A Solar Slowdown?

The latest industry figures value the US solar sector at $28 billion (€24.13 billion). The industry employs more than 250,000 Americans, with about 40 percent of those working in installation and 20 percent in manufacturing. Five years ago, the sector was installing 3,000 megawatts of solar capacity annually. In 2017, the market grew by as much as 10,000 megawatts.

But experts fear this kind of growth will soon be a thing of the past. Dan Whitten, a spokesman for the US Solar Energy Industries Association, said that since January, more than $2.5 billion in solar projects have been canceled and roughly 9,000 American jobs have either been lost or have not been created as a result of the tariffs.

“If demand drops because products are artificially made too expensive for consumers, nobody wins. It’s unlikely that US manufacturing will expand enough to satisfy burgeoning demand,” Whitten told DW. “While we support new US manufacturing, companies are still going to have a hard time competing with products from overseas in the years ahead.”

Made In Jacksonville

China‘s decision to cut back installed solar capacity this year by reducing subsidies has severely affected the global market for solar panels. While surging capacity had left the country struggling to build sufficient national electrical infrastructure, cuts have forced Chinese panel makers to find new buyers overseas.

In March, Florida‘s largest utility NextEra Energy agreed to buy 7 million solar panels from China‘s leading solar maker JinkoSolar Holding. Alongside that agreement, JinkoSolar is building its first US solar panel factory in Jacksonville Florida‘s most populous city.

Once the factory reaches full production after November, JinkoSolar expects it to churn out more than 1 million panels a year for the US market.

While JinkoSolar‘s new plant will boost overall US production, modern solar panel factories are increasingly automated, and profits will likely flow offshore.

Still, city officials in Jacksonville see the new Chinese investment as a major win for local businesses, particularly in services and logistics. The adjacent port expects to handle cargo shipments of raw materials and solar panel components needed for the new plant’s operations.

“In addition to creating 250 new jobs, we expect that JinkoSolar will expand its economic impact in the Jacksonville area as the demand for solar panels in the US grows,” said Tia Ford, a city spokeswoman.

 

Source: DW

The driving force behind the transformation of Miami Beach’s Sunset Harbour, Scott Robins, is taking Deco Drive by storm – his way.

Reimagined into an animated and energetic retail and restaurant hub home to eateries including NaiYaRa, Lucali, jugofresh, and Pubbelly, Robins took what was once a light industrial district and turned it into the beach’s hottest neighborhood. And now, he’s at it again. With a project to revitalize the historic Española Way – the first commercial street in Miami.

OceanDrive sat down with Robins to hear more about his plans for this renaissance of what was once a Mediterranean Spanish Village, developing Sunset Harbour, and his plans for the future opening Wynwood’s first groovy, art-focused hotel.

OceanDrive: Tell us about the renaissance of Española Way.

Scott Robins: It’s actually grown very organically. I’ve owned Española Way since 1991 and it’s been so many different places from the time I bought it to what it is now. Española Way was the original commercial street for Miami Beach, built in the 1920’s. It was the place where everyone came for bohemian experiences. But like everything in Miami Beach, it fell into disrepair. And when I bought it in 1991, it was prostitutes and drug dealers. None of these restaurants and stores were here. And really organically, over time, for me, I like to feel an area and see where it’s going and nurture the progress. And on Española Way, it’s been as long a process as I’ve ever been involved in, in real estate.

OceanDrive: Why has the process of developing this street taken such a long time?

Scott Robins: It’s a complicated street. We have hotels, restaurants, and retail stores. It’s a major pedestrian street. We’ve been building it tenant by tenant, store by store, hotel room by hotel room. And it hasn’t happened quickly. Española Way was always kind of a place where things just happen slow. So it’s been over 25 years since I’ve owned the property and just now I can honestly say that it’s gotten to the point where I think it’s beginning to reach its full potential.

Now we’ve settled into a great group of people. They’ve been here for about 10 or 15 years and we’ve sort of all grown up together on the street. Everyone recognizes how special this street is and how honored we all are to be part of this street and the history of this street.

OceanDrive: You mentioned that Española Way is a street with a storied history. Tell us about the DNA of the neighborhood and its tenants. 

Scott Robins: We have Hosteria Romana. Owner, Marco Efrati is the mayor of Española Way! He has been here the longest, he’s in the center of the street, he’s got the best food, and it’s the happiest loudest place that you could ever be. Everyone that goes there gets an incredible experience – food, entertainment, service. We built Española Way tenant by tenant and we really built it on Marco, and the kind of food, service, and atmosphere he provides.

OceanDriveWhat’s your favorite Italian dish at Hosteria Romana?

Scott Robins: The grilled seafood platter.

OceanDrive: With this notable lane’s makeover underway, what new vendors can we look forward to seeing in the near future?

Scott Robins: Vacancies on this street don’t last very long so we’re pretty much full here! We just opened a new gourmet hamburger restaurant and we’re replacing a couple of our retailers with new retailers.

OceanDrive: In addition to restructuring Española Way, you’ve been coined to develop the beach’s most sought after village, Sunset Harbour. Tell us about this experience?

Scott Robins: Part of what I do – I never force myself on any area – I try to find out what the DNA of an area is. The DNA of Española Way obviously is completely different than the DNA of Sunset Harbour. Española Way is an all-night party, it never stops. It’s mostly tourists and connects Ocean Drive, Lincoln Road, and all of the hotels. Sunset Harbour is really a neighborhood-oriented street.

Sunset Harbour, when I got there, we started to see neighborhood-serving businesses – workout places, gymnasiums, and restaurants that serve the locals rather than the tourists. Sunset Harbour’s DNA was really health, wealth, and welfare. So for me, it’s all about sensing what an area’s about. It’s about what the area wants, what the area needs, and what works best for the area.

OceanDrive: In redeveloping pockets of neighborhoods in South Florida, what are your plans for next?

Scott Robins: My favorite area at the moment is Wynwood. We’re going to develop – my partner Philip Levine and I – a very cool, hip, chic hotel that’s arts-oriented because the DNA in Wynwood is arts and culture. So we want to develop a hotel where arts-oriented people will come, be comfortable, and have a place to stay. Wynwood doesn’t have a hotel yet. We’re going to get a super cool, hip hotel chain out of Santa Monica.

OceanDrive: What would you say is your ultimate favorite area in Miami?

Scott Robins: My heart will always be in Miami Beach.

 

Source: OceanDrive

Mayfair Real Estate Advisors and Terra Group have secured an anchor tenant at Mary Street, a mixed-use development taking shape in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood.

Advisory firm Kaufman Rossin agreed to occupy 64,666 square feet at the Class A project. Developers are transforming a former parking garage, with delivery slated for mid-2019. Kaufman Rossin will lease the building’s top two floors and half of the third floor starting June 2020. The firm is currently headquartered at 2699 S. Bayshore Drive, just two blocks away from Mary Street. The lease represents a 10,000-square-foot expansion, with the tenant relocating nearly 300 employees to the new location.

Co-developer Terra will also lease 13,174 square feet at the Touzet Studio-designed property, bringing Mary Street’s office component to full occupancy. Terra’s new corporate space will be on the building’s third floor and mezzanine level. Located at 3310 Mary St., the 78,000-square-foot project will feature five floors of Class A office space, ground-floor retail space and a publicly accessible, 340-space parking garage.

Pent-Up Demand

Upon delivery, Mary Street will mark the first completion of Class A office space in Coconut Grove’s business district in more than two decades. According to a JLL report, vacancy in Coconut Grove is 1.7 percent, the lowest rate in Miami Dade County’s submarkets. Amenities at Mary Street will include 24-hour security, covered drop-off and valet areas, electric car charging stations, bicycle stations and storage. Jaguar Therapeutic, OXXO Cleaners, Elia restaurant, Workout Spot and a private dentistry practice are among the signed retail tenants.

Tom Capocefalo, senior managing director with Savills Studley, represented Kaufman Rossin, while Chris Dekker, vice president with Mayfair Real Estate Advisors, worked on behalf of the development team.

“The move to this expanded, innovative space represents new beginnings for Kaufman Rossin while keeping us true to our roots in Coconut Grove,” said Blain Heckaman, chief executive officer of Kaufman Rossin, in prepared remarks.

“Our team launched Mary Street to complete the vision of a true live-work-play environment in Coconut Grove,” added David Martin, president & co-founder of Terra.

 

Source: Commercial Property Executive