Developers Propose Two Big Hotel Projects In Miami

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Plans for two Miami hotel projects with hundreds of rooms between them have been submitted for review.

A rendering for a hotel proposed at 7400 S.W. 88th St. in Miami

A rendering for the hotel proposed at 7400 S.W. 88th St. in Miami

Norwich Dade Hotel Group LLC, a company affiliated with New Hampshire-based company Norwich Partners, submitted plans for a 20-story Marriott hotel in downtown Kendall.

The 19-page application proposes 300 hotel rooms and 155 valet-only parking spaces at 7400 S.W. 88th St. in Miami. Renderings for the hotel show signs for two Marriott brands: AC Hotels and Residence Inn. If approved, the property would be built adjacent to the Dadeland Mall. The renderings, submitted May 15 with the application, were designed by Nichols, Brosch, Wurst, Wolfe & Associates.

Grapeland Hospitality Group has proposed a Staybridge Suites near Miami International Airport with 153 rooms and possibly a restaurant and one other commercial space on the property. The Palmer Lake-area development would be located at the corner of N.W. 37th Avenue and N.W. 25th St. in Miami, which is currently vacant. The application includes 142 parking spaces and a swimming pool. The renderings were designed by Architect J. Antonio Rodriguez Tellaheche.

The Miami-Dade County Department of Regulatory and Economic Resources Development Services is currently reviewing the applications.

 

Source: SFBJ

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New Law To Allow Tenants to Showcase Their Energy Efficiency Efforts

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Office tenants who became believers in energy conservation in the heyday of the building sustainability movement about two decades ago only to watch building owners take all the credit have cheered a recent new law that will support, track and promote their efforts at being green.

President Barack Obama signed the Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2015 on April 30. The bipartisan-sponsored law promises to align the interests of building owners and tenants with regard to investments in cost-effective energy efficiency and water conservation measures, create studies that will examine successful sustainable practices, enact data-tracking systems and provide ways to promote voluntary tenant compliance.

The law, also known as the “Tenant Star” act, includes a new federally-sponsored green building designation that’s similar to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) popular Energy Star system. Energy Star, enacted in 1992, provides an energy-efficient rating system for building products, residential homes and commercial buildings. In a recent report, the EPA said the Energy Star system reduced utility bills for residents and businesses by $34 billion in 2014.

However, tenants, the backbone of energy use in commercial buildings, have neither had a consistent national program to measure efficient energy use, nor a way to tout their specific efforts. Allison Porter, vice president of sustainability services for commercial real estate services firm DTZ, says tenants will now have the same kind of opportunities as Energy Star provides for owners to turn data into a basis for action. The new law will allow space occupiers to take responsibility for their usage and receive recognition for conservation efforts, she says.

“Although whole-building measures like Energy Star are a valuable tool, it’s also crucial to acknowledge that tenants’ use of a space has a huge impact on how a building performs,” Porter says. “By encouraging tenants to design and build energy-efficient spaces, Tenant Star will help align the interests of tenant and landlord. I expect that this alignment will clear a path for a new wave of investment in energy-efficient office space, especially coming at a time when the cost of efficient technologies commonly used in office interiors, such as LED lighting and occupancy sensors, has decreased significantly.”

Porter is joined by many other tenant sustainability supporters in her praise of the new law. Anthony Malkin, chairman, president and CEO of New York City-based Empire State Realty Trust Inc., said in a statement that the new law will align office tenants with their landlords to make smart, cost-effective investments in energy-efficient leased spaces. “Broad adoption will save businesses billions of dollars on energy costs in the coming years,” he said.

Jeffrey DeBoer, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based Real Estate Roundtable, which brings together commercial property owners, developers and managers to address national policy issues, called the legislation “a triple win that will spur the economy by creating jobs, enhancing energy security and preserving our environment by cutting greenhouse gases.”

Implementation

The General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for all federal government leasing in the country, will take responsibility for the first section of the law, also known as the Better Buildings Act of 2015. According to the act, the GSA will create model commercial leasing provisions for energy efficiency by Oct. 31, and may begin enacting these provisions in federal leases. The GSA will also publish these provisions and share them with state, county and municipal governments.

The Secretary of Energy is responsible, under this law, to create a study within one year on the feasibility of significantly improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings through design and construction, by owners and tenants, of spaces that will use energy efficient measures. The study will include, among other requirements, such metrics as return on investment and payback analyses, comparisons of spaces that use these measures and those that don’t, impact on employment and actual case studies and data on the spaces where these measures are implemented. The department will start seeking input on this study after Aug. 1.

In addition, to allow tenants to start touting their green policies, the EPA will create the Tenant Star designation as an offshoot of Energy Star. Not only will tenant data be added into the 23-year-old collection program already in place, the new designation will recognize tenants in commercial buildings who voluntarily achieve high levels of energy efficiency in their leased spaces. The EPA will also create a voluntary program to recognize owners and tenants that use energy efficiency in designing and creating new and retrofit space.

Al Skodowski, director of sustainability with commercial real estate services firm Transwestern, says this new law will help those companies that have been fully engaged in driving green practices for many years. “The birth of Tenant Star, as another tool to help our tenants understand their use, reduce energy consumption and to save money, is a very exciting opportunity that will help us continue to improve efficiency in the industry,” he says.

 

Source: NREI

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Vertical Farming Sprouts In Detroit

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Detroit’s urban farmers have proven to be some of the most innovative people in the city. They’ve reclaimed vacant lots and learned how to bring fresh, nutritious food to neighborhoods in need of it.

Artesian Farms of Detroit's Lettuce Harvest

Artesian Farms of Detroit’s Lettuce Harvest

Now two new ventures continue that innovation by introducing vertical farming systems into the city’s mix, the Detroit Free Press reported. One, known as Artesian Farms of Detroit in the Brightmoor district on the far west side, has begun to grow vegetables in a hydroponic system – trays filled with water and nutrients – stacked up to 14 feet tall. The other, known as Green Collar Foods, set up its vertical racks last week in a corner of Eastern Market’s newly renovated Shed 5. It uses an aeroponics system, in which nozzles mist a thin, watery film on the roots of plants suspended in air inside trays.

Growing plants indoors inside cities has been done for a long time in various places around the world, including in the RecoveryPark project on Detroit’s east side. Now adding vertical racks greatly increases the production capacity of any given project by taking advantage of vertical space.

“It doesn’t necessarily take a huge building,” Ron Reynolds, one of the partners in Green Collar Foods, said last week at Eastern Market. “You don’t have to go to the city and say, ‘I’d like that 50,000-square-foot building.’ Effectively in 400 square feet you can have three stories up. So a lot of the buildings begin to open up for viability.”

Co-owners of Green Collar Foods from left: Ray Quatrochi,58, Ron Reynolds,44, and Daniel Casanas,29 inside their vertical farming space in Shed 5 at the Detroit Eastern Market Friday. (Photo: Jessica J. Trevino DFP)

Co-owners of Green Collar Foods from left: Ray Quatrochi,58, Ron Reynolds,44, and Daniel Casanas,29 inside their vertical farming space in Shed 5 at the Detroit Eastern Market Friday. (Photo: Jessica J. Trevino DFP)

These vertical growing systems typify how urban farming has undergone rapid innovation in recent years. Practitioners around the world have learned to wring increased production from seemingly barren urban sites to bring fresh, nutritious food to city residents.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack visited Detroit recently and said that growing food inside cities could become an important part of regional food systems in a world beset by drought and other issues. Detroit, he added, is known far and wide as one of the centers of that movement. “I think it’s real and I think it’s a great complement to the agriculture that takes part in other parts of the country,” Vilsack said. “We face a very interesting challenge of feeding an ever-increasing world population when the land available for production will likely shrink. We have to have new and creative ways to produce the food to feed our people.”

Artesian is the creation of Jeff Adams, a neighborhood resident who spent most of his career marketing automotive products and then spent a decade fund raising for nonprofits. A few years ago, he was inspired by Detroit’s well-known west-side urban farmers like Riet Schumack and Malik Yakini. “I was looking for entrepreneurial opportunities that could employ neighborhood people,” he said last week. “The whole urban garden thing really piqued my interest.”

He bought an empty industrial building in Brightmoor last August. It had been empty since 1998. He installed a system of vertical racks designed and produced by Green Spirit Farms of New Buffalo, Mich. Known as Vertical Growing Stations, the units are 14 to 16 feet high utilizing specially designed lighting that provides the right type of light at the right intensity for a good growing environment.

Each VGS can hold approximately 1,200 to 2,400 plants depending on the produce to be grown. With about 6,000 square feet of space in his building, Adams has enough room to install 40 of the vertical racks, which he estimates is the equivalent to about 20 acres of field growing. Adams can harvest 17 crops per year of a mix of salad greens including several types of leafy lettuce plus spinach, kale, and basil.

For somebody who was trying to solve as many problems as possible, vertical farming seemed to offer the best opportunities. “You look at what it means for our city – transforming blight, employing local people, and then you look at how it affects the environment,” he said. “This system can grow produce year round and uses about 90 percent less water than what is used where our big agriculture belts are in California and Arizona.”

He hired a local Brightmoor woman, Yvette Martinez Evans, to work full time helping him tend to the plants. “I thought it was great because I always liked growing stuff in the outdoors,” Evans said last week.

Unlike the vast majority of community gardens in Detroit, Artesian Farms is a for-profit entity, an L3C organization known as a social enterprise, where the profits go to support community needs. Initial funding for the project was provided by Impact T3 Investment Fund, Skillman Foundation, Max M. & Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation and the Scott Brickman Family Trust.

Adams plans initially to distribute his produce in local farmers markets, but he’s working on an agreement with the Whole Foods chain to sell his salad greens in the company’s stores in metro Detroit. “This will turn a pretty significant profit once it gets operational,” he said.

 

Source: Miami Herald

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Is Brickell’s Biggest Hole Getting Miami’s Tallest Building?

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Scrapped Project

Scrapped Project

The Chinese consortium that bought the former Capital Brickell Place site, which has been sitting empty for years and as of right now is the biggest open hole in the ground in Brickell, is claiming on its website that they are building the tallest building in Miami there, according to The Next Miami.

The website is only in Chinese though,and the website of their Chinese/ American partner isn’t revealing much. Either way, until it’s verified, it’s only rumor. They also supposedly claim to have gained “preliminary approval” for the project, although no details are given.

 

Source: Curbed Miami

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CRE Pros OK With Burying The LEED

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Ask Anthony Malkin about LEED and he’ll tell you how he really feels.

The chief executive officer of Empire State Realty Trust thinks the clean air certification for buildings (officially Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a good starting point, but it doesn’t do much for tenants or landlords. Instead, it’s all about keeping energy costs low in buildings with new technologies as opposed to a points system for miniscule things.

“We have a very good adviser who said if you don’t get LEED, it’s going to be very difficult for you to criticize it. So we did,” Mr. Malkin said as a panelist at Commercial Observer’s “Upgrade New York” breakfast last week. “The concept that you get a point for harvesting bamboo in Indonesia, putting it on a boat that stops by Fiji and picks up a bottle of water…Brings it to a port in L.A., which then takes it in a train across the United States and is put on the floor of an office in New York City, and you get a point for that? That’s just freaking absurd.”

His fellow panelists agreed that a new tenant, particularly in the tech sector, wants a building that can keep the energy bills low more than anything. But the strongest comments came from Mr. Malkin, whose revamped his Empire State Building now uses less energy with state-of-the-art measures such as lights that dim when the room is empty or is getting more sunlight, and elevators that reuse energy from their breaks to power upward elevators.

“This is the most efficient building of its size of any age in the United States that’s occupied,” Mr. Malkin said. “We have an energy intensity unit, or energy unit intensity of 72 in this building. The median in New York City is 218. It is no colder, it’s no hotter. It’s no darker. There are no fewer elevators.”

His tenants might not even know the building is LEED certified, which judges how environmentally friendly it is based on the number of points it has for things such as bike racks and emissions. Many technology and emerging companies are more concerned with how much energy a building uses than its ranking on the LEED scale, said co-panelist Sacha Zarba, an executive managing director at CBRE who specializes in tech tenants.

“LEED doesn’t hurt,” said Mr. Zarba, who represented LinkedIn in its leases at the Empire State (it now has 160,000 square feet). “From a tenant perspective, it’s not a box that usually needs to be checked. It’s important to LinkedIn—the energy efficiency and sustainability of a building—but LEED as a word is not.”

View a video of Anthony Malkin, Chief Executive Officer Of Empire State Realty Trust, discussing LEED certification below:

 

Source: Commercial Observer

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Two Coconut Grove Office Buildings Sold For $42M

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BayviewPlazaTwo office buildings in Coconut Grove were sold for a combined $42 million, commercial brokerage Marcus & Millichap announced Thursday.

The first, dubbed the Bayview Executive Plaza, is a 57,155-square-foot building at 3225 Aviation Avenue. It is occupied by the Femwell Group Health, Wolfberg Alvarez & Partners and the accounting firm Pinchasik Yelen Muskat Stein.

The second, named Continental Plaza, is a, 80,380-square-foot building at 3250 Mary Street. It’s across the street from Park Grove, an upcoming mixed-use development that has plans for three 20-story condo towers with retail and office space.

Both were purchased by a company titled Allegra Holding, and both were sold by TA Associates Realty.

Douglas Mandel and Benjamin Silver of Marcus & Millichap brokered the sale for both the buyer and the seller. “These buildings are well positioned to reap the benefits associated with the explosive growth of new developments in The Grove, and the buyer will be able to take advantage of future spikes in demand that will push rental rates to new highs,” Mandel said in a statement.

 

Source: The Real Deal

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Miami, Two More South Florida Cities Among ‘Greenest’ In The Nation

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Rank: 5 2014 median air quality index: 43 Carpoolers: 10% Public transportation riders: 11% Walking commuters: 4% Biking commuters: 1%

Rank: 5
2014 median air quality index: 43
Carpoolers: 10%
Public transportation riders: 11%
Walking commuters: 4%
Biking commuters: 1%

Carpooling and healthy air quality is what makes Miami one of the greenest cities in America, according to a survey from consumer advocacy site NerdWallet.

Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Hialeah were the three South Florida cities that made the Top 15 list based mostly on its air quality and its penchant for carpooling. That shouldn’t be a surprise for everyone trying to make their to work via Interstate 95.

Fort Lauderdale Rank: 11 2014 median air quality index: 54 Carpoolers: 10% Public transportation riders: 5% Walking commuters: 3% Biking commuters: 1%

Fort Lauderdale
Rank: 11
2014 median air quality index: 54
Carpoolers: 10%
Public transportation riders: 5%
Walking commuters: 3%
Biking commuters: 1%

What South Florida did lack was the use of public transportation, which less than 12 percent of commuters use. For instance, in Miami, only 11 percent of residents commute via public transit, one of the lowest public transportation figures among
NerdWallet’s Top 10.

Hialeah Rank: 15 2014 median air quality index: 43 Carpoolers: 8% Public transportation riders: 2% Walking commuters: 2% Biking commuters: 0%

Hialeah
Rank: 15
2014 median air quality index: 43
Carpoolers: 8%
Public transportation riders: 2%
Walking commuters: 2%
Biking commuters: 0%To pick the top cities in the nation, NerdWallet took a look at the following:

To pick the top cities in the nation, NerdWallet took a look at the following:

• 2014 Media Air Quality Index.

• Percentage of workers who carpool, bike, take public transit or
walk to work.

• Percentage of occupied buildings with 10 or more residences.

• The number of residential buildings with a primary heat source of solar, coal or wood per 10,000 buildings.

 

Source: SFBJ

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Working Alone, Together

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One of the largest leasing deals in Miami-Dade last year was for 37,700 square feet in a building on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.

The lessee: WeWork. Founded in 2010, this New York-based company specializes in creating shared workspaces for startups, private contractors, artists, small firms and international corporations — basically, everyone. WeWork, which was valued at $5 billion in December, has opened locations in nine cities across the U.S., plus two in Israel. The firm’s four floors at 350 Lincoln Road, a 1940s-era building that will be its first Miami location, will be among WeWork’s newest locations once renovations are complete.

“As we build out our global network with locations in major global cities, Miami of course is on our map,” Mark Lapidus, head of real estate for WeWork, told The Real Deal. He cited the city’s growing “entrepreneurial market” and its status as a “gateway to Latin America” as reasons for opening the new location.

WeWork is far from first to market in Miami with the shared office space concept. Local players have been operating here since at least 2010, and many are in the process of expanding.

Pipeline Brickell founders, Philippe Houdard and Todd Oretsky.

Pipeline Brickell founders,
Philippe Houdard and Todd Oretsky.

“The demand for what we offer is very high,” said Philippe Houdard, co-founder of Pipeline, which has operated in a 23,000-square-foot office space in Brickell since 2012. So high, Houdard added, that occupancy for Pipeline’s private suites and reserved desks is near 100 percent, with tenants ranging from established corporations such as Italian car design company Pininfarina to relatively unknown companies including Ironhack, a computer programming school, and Crea7ive, a local web design company.

Monthly rates for shared offices can range from $99 for a mailbox and a phone number to more than $3,000 for a private suite. Services, much like the rates, vary from operation to operation, but typically a shared-office space in Miami offers access to refreshments, high-speed Internet, meeting rooms, and — perhaps most significantly — networking opportunities and camaraderie.

“There is a sense a community,” said Ana Maria Yumiseva, owner of Frecuencia Latinoamerica, a mobile technology company that operates in Pipeline’s Brickell office.

Donna Abood, managing director of the Miami office for Avison Young, said Miami-Dade is fertile ground for shared office space. “When you have entrepreneurs, you have a lot of startup businesses, and their need to collaborate is great,” said Abood, a 30-year veteran of South Florida commercial real estate.

An added bonus: co-working spaces typically offer short-term leases or require no leases at all.  Short-term and month-to-month leases are traits shared by an ancestor of the co-working space: the serviced “executive suite” office model. In the 1980s, companies such as Regus started opening executive suite offices in Miami-Dade that provided separate businesses a shared secretary and a conference room. Unlike the new generation of co-working spaces, tenants in executive suites (which continue to operate in Miami) tend to keep to themselves. “They aren’t looking for collaboration,” Abood said.

Büro Miami features open areas as well as private suites.

Büro Miami features open areas as well as private suites.

Michael Feinstein, CEO of the Büro Group, said his company was the first to bring the collaborative co-working space model to Miami (Abood said that if Büro wasn’t the first, they were certainly one of the first). Feinstein said he had spent a lot of time in coffee shops when he worked as a resort development consultant back in 2009. Then inspiration struck.

“We had not seen anyone actually [create] a shared work environment, so we went about doing it ourselves,” said Feinstein, who started Büro in Midtown Miami in 2010 with the help of friends, family and  later on, an investment from G3 Capital.

Büro now provides space for more than 100 companies (The Real Deal South Florida is a temporary tenant). The company operates in a second, 10,000-square-foot location in Sunset Harbour in Miami Beach, and Feinstein doubled his office space in Midtown Miami from 10,000 to 20,000 square feet last year. They are also opening additional spaces in the Coppertone building in the Miami Modern Historic District and the Engle Building in Coconut Grove.

Pipeline is growing, too. This summer they will open a Coral Gables office, which will include specialized services for lawyers, Houdard said. Pipeline is also planning to build an 80,000-square-foot space in Miami’s Little Haiti area. They also operate in Philadelphia.

Pipeline and Büro are seeing increased competition in the market, and not just from behemoths like WeWork. In Little Haiti, Urbana Atlantic Group and Conway Commercial Real Estate just finished converting a 26,000-square-foot office building, once used as a BellSouth headquarters, into MADE at the Citadel, a co-working space that offers shared work space in addition to a shared workshop area for artists.

“We are just opening our doors now and about 40 percent of our office space is already accounted for,” said Timothy Conway, managing director of Conway Commercial Real Estate. “And we have not done much marketing, if any.”

Another shared office space entity, The Lab Miami in Wynwood, just celebrated its two-year anniversary. Its managing director Tamara Wendt said co-working spaces are proliferating because they’re attractive to young professionals.  “Millennials and tech startups are drawn to co-working spaces because it’s a low barrier to entry and low cost for office space,” explained Wendt.

Wendt and other sources estimate that there are 15 to 20 shared offices ventures operating in Miami-Dade. Companies providing shared office spaces are still a relatively new concept in the area and are not yet specifically tracked. Wendt noted that the growth of shared offices is not just local or national — it’s a global phenomenon. “Co-working spaces are doing well around the world,” she said. “It’s a very fast-growing segment.”

 

Source: The Real Deal

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The “Greenest Schools On Earth” Do More Than Put Solar Panels On The Roof

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To be the “Greenest School on Earth” in the eyes of the U.S. Green Building Council, it takes more than a few solar panels on the roof.

GreenestSchoolThose are nice, of course. But you also need to teach sustainability throughout the curriculum and engage students in improving environmental performance. The greenest schools have an “all-school approach,” says Rachel Gutter, director of the group’s Center for Green Schools.

This year the council is giving its top award to Dunbarton High School, in Ontario, Canada. Gutter says it exemplifies the top-to-bottom ethos, even if its building is less shiny and energy efficient than some. “The place where green schools can make the biggest impact—and where they fall down—is the level of engagement from the school occupants and the broader community, and whether they’ve created a culture of sustainability,” Gutter says.

GreenestSchool4Dunbarton has a 40-seat outdoor classroom (meant to bring students closer to nature), a 5,000 square foot “pollinator garden” (designed to attract butterflies and the like), and “bee condominiums” (stacks of wood with holes to provide shelter for insects). It’s also installed energy efficient lighting and windows, introduced an organic waste management program, and takes part in an Atlantic salmon restoration program. Many of these initiatives are led by students.

“One of the things we loved about Dunbarton is that so much of its activity is driven by the students and the community. We really believe that is the way it can be sustained and magnified,” Gutter says. “They’re also applying sustainability across many different subjects, from photography and art classes to finance and math.

The “Greenest School on Earth” title is a little misleading as the council doesn’t actually survey the planet for the best school. Instead, schools submit their own applications and a team of judges choose the ones it likes most. This year, schools from 20 countries came forward and the criteria encompassed three categories: how well schools are reducing energy, water and waste; how well they’re enhancing health and well being in their environment; and how well they’re teaching environmental “literacy.” The judging is subjective and relative: Schools are awarded for progress as much as absolute accomplishments.

GreenestSchool9The judges gave an honorable mention to Vele Secondary School in Limpopo, South Africa. Unlike Dunbarton, which was built in the 1960s, it’s a new school with its own energy monitoring system, natural ventilation, and gardens for growing food. But it doesn’t engage students in the same way Dunbarton does, according to Carly Cowan, Center for Green Schools’s international program manager. “The big differentiating factor between Dunbarton and Vele is that Dunbarton’s students showed a lot more leadership and initiative in making the school green,” she says.

The big point is that schools can do a lot, even without big resources. What matters is whether people are willing to get involved. “There’s always an accessible project to be advanced at the student level or faculty and administration level,” says Gutter. “You can start anywhere and move on from there.”

 

Source: FastCoExist

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Developer Plans Live/Work Lofts And Boat Storage Project On Miami River

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A group of developers is preparing a plan for live/work loft units and a boat storage facility with a marina along the Miami River.

Chapman Ducote on a Delta Powerboats yacht.

Chapman Ducote on a Delta Powerboats yacht.

Chapman Ducote, the managing member of the development group, said he’s planning two buildings at 600 N.W. Seventh Ave. One would be a dry stack for boat storage attached to a high-end marina. The other building would have live/work lofts with high ceilings and a modern look, in addition to some retail, he said. While the size of the buildings aren’t finalized, Ducote said the mixed-use building would be eight to 12 stories tall.

“There is a beautiful neighborhood on the other side of the canal from us and we want to be in tune with what works in the neighborhood,” Ducote said. “We will remove a boat yard that isn’t very pretty and replace it with a nice modern building.”

Miami Boat Storage, an Aventura-based partnership between AL US Investments, Quillpoint Capital Investments and Ducote, recently bought the 47,152-square-foot lot for $3.65 million to save it from foreclosure. Ducote is also the president and CEO of Miami Beach-based credit card processing firm Merchant Services LTD, a professional racer on the American Le Mans series, and a major investor Delta Powerboats, a Swedish company that builds yachts fully out of carbon fiber.

“The live/work concept, particularly in other cities, is starting to work and get some legs behind it,” Ducote said. “You have residential and office in the same dwelling with a wall separating the two.”

 

Source: SFBJ

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