24-Story Mixed-Use Project With Hotel Coming To Brickell

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Rendering of the 24-story, 250,000-square-foot mixed use project planned for Brickell. (Image Credit: Metro 1 Development)

Real estate developer Tony Cho and hotel developer Robert Finvarb announced Friday they are developing a 250,000-square-foot, 24-story, mixed-use project in the heart of the booming neighborhood.

Located on Southwest First Avenue between Seventh and Eighth Streets, the project aims to attract a “neighborhood style hotel” and retail, as well as possible commercial and residential components. Cho and Finvarb recently acquired the site for $18.4 million.

The building will be adjacent to Metromover and Metrorail stations and a block from the site of the Brickell Backyard segment of the Underline project, an endeavor to transform the 10 miles below the Metrorail along South Dixie Highway into a green thoroughfare of bike paths, trails and street vendors.

Cho, who founded Miami-based Metro 1 Development, has worked on several neighborhood revitalization efforts. He most recently announced plans for the Magic City Innovation District, an area spanning 15 acres just north of Wynwood with a focus on art, entertainment, innovation and sustainability.

Finvarb is the founder of Miami-based Robert Finvarb Companies, which has developed 17 hotels since 2002 in seven states and the District of Columbia.

 

Source: Miami Herald

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How Developers Are Redesigning Miami, Nine Acres At A Time

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For decades, these three large city blocks in a prime location — straddling Miami Avenue and butting up against the Miami River and the Brickell financial district — lay inexplicably vacant.

Now, in the seeming twinkling of an eye, they have been utterly transformed. Brickell City Centre, which opened in November, is an urban animal of a concentrated intensity more evocative of Hong Kong or Tokyo than anything Miami has seen before: five towers connected by a multi-level, open-air shopping center plugged directly into a Metromover station and layered over underground parking tunneled beneath the streets. Pedestrians enter porous breezeways seamlessly from the surrounding streets, while above, shoppers cross bustling pedestrian fly-overs, protected overhead by a “climate ribbon” canopy that snakes across all three blocks like a long strip of origami.

It feels like a real city. And that’s precisely the stated goal of the relatively new, largely untested and increasingly controversial zoning category that produced it, and that now may be paving the way to a redrawing of broad swaths of Miami.

The goal: to create true urban neighborhoods and districts in underdeveloped areas of the city that, far from being self-contained islands, are painstakingly planned, interwoven and compatible with the city fabric around them. Often in exchange for greater height and density, developers must spend millions on new public spaces, streets and amenities — sometimes paying cash into public kitties — while giving city planners and the city commission a significant say in the shape of the final product.

The concept has taken off, to the consternation of some neighborhood activists. SAP was once reserved mostly to the city’s core, but developers building in far-flung, residential neighborhoods are now taking advantage.

“What the SAP does uniquely is, it sets up a table where the city comes in, stakeholders come in, and we can all figure out what the optimal shape this project can take is,” Miami planning director Francisco Garcia, who helped author the Miami 21 code while at the private planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk, said in an interview. “In Miami, I don’t think there is any area that is not undergoing some degree of change, or redevelopment, or thinking about redevelopment. This is our world today here in Miami. So let’s approach this emphasis to redevelop and reshape the city in a creative way, and have it yield the best results.”

Aside from Brickell City Centre, which has two more planned phases yet to start, the SAP has also led to the lauded, near-total redevelopment of the formerly dormant Miami Design District. The rebirth of the district, about 60 percent complete, has meant new, street-friendly retail buildings and a pedestrian promenade connecting two large public plazas.

Meanwhile, on the north bank of the Miami River, River Landing would bring a multi-story restaurant and retail center with apartments to the site of the demolished Mahi Shrine in the Civic Center area. On the south bank, Chetrit Group’s $1 billion Miami River complex would bring 58- and 60-story towers and three levels of shops to a site formerly occupied by an abandoned restaurant and empty warehouses. Both projects would include new public spaces; Chetrit would underwrite upgrades to Jose Marti Park and contribute millions into an affordable housing trust fund.

If anything, these projects were celebrated. But as SAP applications proliferate across the city for everything from tech villages to mixed-use residential and commercial districts and even school and hospital redesigns, the sheer size and scale of some of the proposals is giving many city residents pause, if not provoking outright alarm.

Entrepreneur Moishe Mana’s massive Mana Wynwood SAP, which would bring shops, a trade center and residential towers rising up to 24 stories to two dozen acres of mostly vacant land, prompted a year of negotiation and public battles with other property owners in the rapidly redeveloping warehouse district. Mana won commission approval after agreeing to spend millions putting utilities under ground and redrawing the original plan to scale back construction facing the heart of Wynwood.

Elsewhere, developer Michael Simkins talked about using the SAP process to design an innovation center in blighted Park West immediately south of Interstate 395, including a controversial observation tower designed to also serve as a digital billboard, although his attorney says he’s currently reassessing whether to pursue an SAP.

And now a flurry of potential new SAPs has raised concerns that the process could become a runaway train barreling through established neighborhoods and dramatically changing their character. In and around the city’s Upper Eastside, three developers and a hospital have submitted applications to the city or are expected to soon, all within a tiny area of roughly 40 square blocks:

  • Legions West, a 1.2-million-square-foot complex abutting Legion Park, to be built on the site of a recently demolished American Legion post and neighboring Art Deco apartment buildings that formerly housed dozens of low-income families. The developer would spend millions on improvements to the park.
  • Eastside Ridge, proposed by the owners of Design Place, who want to turn 22 acres of moderately priced townhouse units into a mass of sky-high residential and office towers with nearly 3,000 condos.
  • Miami Jewish Health Systems, across Second Avenue from Design Place, which is planning an expansion of an existing campus. The hospital wants to open a new dementia-focused assisted living facility, research center and convention hotel, and redesign other aspects of its campus.
  • Magic City, a 15-acre assemblage including industrial buildings and a demolished trailer park straddling Little Haiti and Little River that developers Tony Cho and Bob Zangrillo want to convert into a technology, residential and cultural center.

Legions West and Eastside Ridge are perhaps the most controversial of the SAP submissions to date, in part because they would tower over neighbors and replace low-rise, low-cost rental housing. The Legions project would drop four towers up to 15 stories tall next to two protected historic districts: the MiMo Biscayne district with a 35-foot height limit, and the single-family Bayside Historic District. It would also include part of the adjacent and now-historic Legion Park in order to qualify for the needed nine acres to propose an SAP — an aspect that generated false fears that the developer, who plans to spend millions on upgrades, would privatize the park.

Renderings of the Eastside Ridge plan, which depict what seems to be a massive, gleaming steel-and-glass city-within-a city rising from the modest urban landscape of Little Haiti, has sent residents into a tizzy. Some in the community, already hyper-acute to the pressures of gentrification, believe they are being boxed in and pushed out by new development.

“The more we learn about these mammoth projects, the more concerned we are,” said Marleine Bastien, a Haitian-American activist who has been outspoken about gentrification of the neighborhood and the apparent lack of consideration for community input. “What we resent is for us to be brought in at the 11th hour when everything is cooked and ready to eat, and we get the crumbs.”

Garcia, Miami’s planning director, insists that community input is a central tenet of the Special Area Plan, which requires reams of paperwork, months of debate with city planners and multiple hearings in order to green-light a project. But some critics say there is evidence to the contrary.

“In Wynwood, they up-zoned 45 different properties to as high as 20 and 24 stories, which is a complete violation of the law,” said veteran Morningside activist Elvis Cruz, who argues that the city is flouting a Miami 21 requirement that all new development be compatible with its setting. “But that’s the way it works in the city. They just interpret things as they wish. It’s completely out of scale and character.”

People critical or skeptical of some of the newer SAPs even includes some prominent figures who have strongly backed such projects in the past. Horacio Stuart Aguirre, chairman of the Miami River Commission, which reviews projects along the waterway, said it’s one thing to approve SAPs on undeveloped land long contemplated for dense redevelopment, like the river properties close to downtown Miami, but entirely another to plunk those down amid settled, existing neighborhoods.

Though SAPs must be approved by the city commission, which has been no rubber stamp, Aguirre says he fears the “goodies” promised by developers of SAPs to the city — including new jobs, the creation of new public spaces and payments toward future affordable housing — prove too tempting to turn down. (None has been, yet.)

“Brickell City Centre is a wonderful idea, where it was done. It’s in Brickell, for crying out loud,” Aguirre said. “But should we have 20 of those reiterations all over the city? What happens to the character of individual neighborhoods? What happens to the idea of local communities?”

But Miami 21 designers say the SAP has always encouraged developers to embrace the neighborhoods in which they’re investing, and put in the extra expense, effort and time that sensitive master planning requires. They note that developers, even without SAPs, could always pursue up-zoning without providing anything in return to the community.

“They are a terrific improvement over the prior situation,” said Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, whose firm authored the Miami 21 code. “It’s an invitation to making a better plan than what is there now.”

Garcia also says the city puts SAP proposals through a grind of an extensive review, and some submissions never make it out of the process because developers drop them after realizing what’s required for approval. He disputes the idea that developers and the city use SAPs in order to super-size projects.

“The perception by some is this is simply a race for the gluttonous,” Garcia said. “But I will tell you there are significant amounts of development capacity and density that are left on the table in each and every one of these SAPs.”

To be sure, height and density are part of the equation, but not the entire picture. What makes SAPs attractive to the city and developers is the flexibility afforded in designing what often are sprawling campuses. Roads can be moved. Buildings can be massed and shifted in ways they otherwise couldn’t. The rigidities of the city’s laws can be unlocked, although not ignored. “If I have the possibility to do that, why wouldn’t I?” asks Garcia.

Noting that the Design District SAP is hardly tall by Miami standards, Magic City’s Cho said he expects to submit an application for an SAP in part because the project he wants to build — the one he says is best for the area — is impermissible under the regular zoning code. For one thing, much of the 15 acres he and Zangrillo own are zoned industrial, and Cho says he’s hoping to include hundreds of low-cost residential units. Likely, that will be done by building “micro” units, tiny apartments made affordable by their size.

“The existing zoning is antiquated and outdated,” said Cho, who began investing years ago in Little Haiti real estate. “That’s not in the best interest of Miami. You don’t want a neighborhood that can’t develop residential.”

For Garcia, whose department hasn’t weighed in on Magic City, and has only begun to look at Eastside Ridge and Legions West, that’s the underlying truth behind Miami’s transformation. The city is evolving, and as downtown and Brickell become entirely built-out, and Wynwood’s land becomes price-prohibitive, developers will begin to invest and rebuild the city’s farther-flung neighborhoods. When that happens, he says, the city needs the tools to map out the right future.

“There has been a great explosion of building in Miami during the last six or seven years. But that’s a data-point. The real question is: Is that good? Is that bad?” he says. “It is a very positive trend and it is getting us closer to what Miami is and should be. Miami will not be in the near future a sleepy town that is a vacation resort for the wealthy. It should be a real city.”

 

Source: Miami Herald

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Little Haiti Will Be South Florida’s Hottest Neighborhood In 2017, Report Says

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The Little Haiti area will be South Florida’s hottest residential neighborhood in 2017, even as the wider region cools down, according to a recent report released by real estate website Zillow.

The company predicts home values in the gentrifying area north of downtown Miami will rise 4.6 percent this year. (Zillow included Little River, Buena Vista and the area around the Design District — together once known as Lemon City — in its analysis.) That’s the fastest rate in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. But South Florida as a whole will grow at a 1.6 percent clip, Zillow said. Miami’s growth rate puts it at number 90 of the country’s 96 largest metro areas, according to Zillow projections.

Little Haiti, ‘The Next Wynwood’

With Brickell and the Beach overbuilt, developers are now zeroing in on under-valued neighborhoods close to the urban core.

“This could be the next Wynwood” is the mantra of many investors and home flippers crowding into Little Haiti. The average home there is valued at $191,500, up 19.6 percent over the last year, according to Zillow.

Just south of the booming neighborhood, the Archdiocese of Miami wants to sell the 15-acre campus of Archbishop Curley-Notre Dame High School in Buena Vista. Developers have also unveiled plans for large, mixed-use projects. And restaurants and commercial business are moving in, too, most recently Entercom Communications, one of the country’s biggest radio broadcasters, which signed a lease in Little River.

Some business owners and residents are worried they could be forced out by the wave of cash, and that Little Haiti’s unique cultural heritage is under siege. In March, with the support of many Haitian Americans, the city of Miami officially recognized the area roughly between 54th Street and 79th Street, and Northwest Sixth Avenue and Northeast Second Avenue, as Little Haiti.

Zillow predicts the other top neighborhoods in South Florida in 2017 will be the 441 corridor in Hollywood (the residential area south of the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino); South Middle River in Fort Lauderdale; Highland Garden in Hollywood; and Liberty City in Miami.

South Florida Slowdown

The overall slowdown in South Florida might come as a surprise after years of big gains. Fueled by foreign investment, real estate in Miami Beach, Brickell and other high-rise havens recovered quickly after the housing bubble burst, leaving less fashionable. But now that a strong dollar has cooled the condo market, overall growth is plummeting compared to other major metro areas.

“We’re expecting a drastic slowdown,” said Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Zillow. “Miami was the one market where I was starting to get concerned about a bubble because of the foreign investment flowing in and prices becoming so unaffordable. … A slowdown is actually a good thing because it could allow incomes to catch up.”

The volume of home sales in Miami-Dade fell by double digits in three of the four months leading up to November’s presidential election. Zillow also found that Miami has a higher unemployment rate and slower projected wage growth than other big cities. Recession in Latin America prevented Miami’s economy from booming at the rapid clip experienced in other parts of Florida and the Southeast in 2016.

The metro areas projected to experience the biggest increases in home values this year are Nashville, Tennessee; Seattle; Provo, Utah; Orlando; and Salt Lake City.

 

Source: Miami Herald

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Developer To Propose ‘Community’ Plan In Edgewater

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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

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South Florida’s Biggest 2016 Office Deals

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biggest office deals of 2016

Whether they’re downtown skyscrapers wrapped in glass or sprawling campuses out in the ‘burbs, office properties make up a huge part of the real estate marketplace here in South Florida.

And while glitzy new condo projects often steal the limelight, The Real Deal is showcasing the five biggest office deals struck in South Florida during 2016, as well as the players who made them happen.

1. Southeast Financial Center: $516.6M

Southeast Financial Center

Amancio Ortega, the world’s second-richest man and owner of clothing chain Zara, is not known for using half measures. The billionaire made a name for himself in Miami’s real estate scene when he bought a full block of Lincoln Road last year for $370 million in cash.

Then, in December, Ortega again blew the roof off the commercial market here when he bought downtown’s Southeast Financial Center for $516.6 million. The tower is a landmark in the Miami skyline at 55 stories, making it Florida’s tallest office building. And with 1.2 million square feet of leasable space, it’s also downtown’s biggest office building by about 400,000 square feet.

Just like his other record-breaking purchases around the globe, Ortega paid cash for the building. The seller was JP Morgan Asset Management, which had started shopping the property with brokerage HFF this summer to cash out on its investment.

Even with the jaw-dropping price tag, the $430 per square foot Ortega paid was actually at a discount when comparing it to other office deals in the area. The building is 88 percent occupied, mostly by law firms and financial groups, and asking rents range between $22 and $47 per square foot.

2/3. Tie between Miami Tower and Las Olas City Centre Plaza: $220M

Miami Tower

Coming in second place is a tie between another two landmark buildings, both of which sold for a flat $220 million and signaled confidence in their respective cities from market watchers.

The first deal to close this year was in May, when Japanese trade conglomerate Sumitomo Corp. of Americas purchased the color-changing Miami Tower for roughly $367 per square foot.

Decked out with a $1.5 million LED light system, the 47-story tower is hard to miss in Miami’s skyline. It has 600,000 square feet of rentable space, 92 percent of which was occupied at the time of its sale with asking rents ranging from $38 to $52.50 per foot.

For some commercial brokers, the deal illustrated how far Miami has come since the late 2000s real estate crash threw property values in a tailspin. The seller, LaSalle Investment Management, had paid $105 million for the tower just six years prior. Sumitomo’s long-term bet on the Miami office market also meant the city’s profile among foreign investors was only getting better.

Las Olas City Centre

Four months later and roughly 30 miles to the north of Miami Tower, Fort Lauderdale enjoyed a similarly massive deal when Deutsche Bank bought the Las Olas City Centre office building for $220 million.

Unlike the Miami Tower, Las Olas City Centre is only 23 stories tall with 408,064 square feet of rentable space. But that size difference meant the Fort Lauderdale office building fetched a much pricier $539 per square foot for its seller, JPMorgan Asset Management. The property was almost entirely leased at the time of its sale, as well.

The deal marked Fort Lauderdale’s most expensive office sale in 2016, capping off a year of rising commercial property values in the city. JPMorgan had bought the tower for $164 million just five years earlier.

4. Datran Center: $150M

Datran Center

Kendall, a sprawling suburban neighborhood relatively far from the action in downtown Miami, has become something of a hotspot for commercial investment this year.

That trend became all too easy to read in August, when an investment group led by ABS Partners Real Estate and Acre Valley Real Estate Capital bought the two-tower Datran Center office complex for $150 million. The seller was USAA Real Estate Co. and a Canadian real estate investment trust, who had placed the 18 and 20-story buildings on the market in July of last year.

Measuring just under 500,000 square feet, Datran’s sale broke down to roughly $300 per foot, rivaling the prices paid for more centrally located properties in the downtown area. Together, they’re about 80 percent occupied with rents ranging between $38 and $41 per square foot.

The towers’ distance from the downtown area was actually a selling point for the buyers, who said at the time that Datran was attractive because it was far from Miami’s “highly congested business district.” The buildings also neighbor the Dadeland South Metrorail station.

Much like this year’s other big-ticket commercial deals, the Datran sale also showed how South Florida’s office market is beginning to gain ground in the competition for investment dollars between other major U.S. metropolitan areas.

5. Courvoisier Centre: $140M

Courvoisier Centre

While all of the above deals came down to a handshake, this last one is more akin to a marriage.

Parkway Properties, looking to squeeze value out of its Courvoisier Centre office complex in Brickell Key, sold an 80 percent stake in the property to a group of Spanish investors led by conglomerate Corporación Masaveu for $140 million.

The deal was particularly shrewd for Parkway: not only was it keeping a 20 percent ownership stake, Courvoisier’s sale also meant Parkway would recoup the $145.8 million it paid to acquire the property in 2014. For Masaveu, whose real estate arm has a penchant for urban office buildings, the joint-venture translated to a major foothold in Miami’s preeminent commercial market: Brickell.

Courvoisier is composed of two office buildings totaling 385,841 square feet, plus a parking garage with 941 spaces. The sale was announced in November 2015, though it closed sometime at the beginning of this year. At the time of the closing, Courvoisier was 88 percent occupied with rents ranging from $40 to $52 per square foot.

 

Source: The Real Deal

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Massive Transformation Proposed In Part Of Miami’s Little Haiti With 28-Story Towers

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A 68-year-old, two-story apartment complex in Miami’s Little Haiti could be transformed with a zoning proposal allowing towers as tall as 28 stories and up to 5.42 million square feet of development.

To view a SFBJ slideshow of the Eastside Ridge in Miami’s Little Haiti, click on the photo

SPV Realty, managed by Sharon Olson in New York, hired Kobi Karp Architecture to craft a redevelopment plan for its 22.5-acre site at 5045 N.E. 2nd Ave. It currently has the walled-in Design Place Apartments totaling 515 units. The company wants to rezone it using a special area plan (SAP) titled Eastside Ridge that would increase its density and height in addition to allowing commercial uses.

On Dec. 21, the city’s Urban Design Review Committee will consider the SPV Realty’s SAP and site plan, with a maximum development potential of 2,798 apartments, 418 hotel rooms, 283,798 square feet of commercial/retail space, 97,103 square feet of office space and 4,636 parking spaces. Building heights would range from eight to 28 stories — higher than other buildings in Little Haiti.

North of downtown Miami and west of Biscayne Boulevard, the Little Haiti neighborhood has been overlooked by developers for years. Its median household income of $27,457 in 2013 was below county-wide income levels, according to U.S. Census data.

However, increasing prices in booming neighborhoods to the south such as Wynwood and the Design District have prompted some businesses and residents to move to Little Haiti. Tony Cho and Dragon Global recently announced plans to redevelop 15 acres at the corner of Northeast 62nd street and Northeast 4th Avenue as Magic City with a mix of entertainment, residential and commercial uses. They have yet to announce development density on that site.

Kobi Karp said SPV Realty hired him a few years ago to develop a plan to make its apartment complex better for its residents and the community. He said the owner would work to keep residents on the property as it’s redeveloped. These apartments would be for everyday working people, Karp said.

“The owner has been here for decades and doesn’t have enough apartments,” Karp said. “They said, ‘I am full and these buildings are falling apart so why don’t I built more?’”

Karp said Eastside Ridge would better integrate the property with the community, including the Jewish Health facility on its west side, where another redevelopment plan is proposed, and Archbishop Curley Notre Dame High School to the south. New internal streets and green spaces would invite the public onto the property.

There would be pocket parks on every corner, a park along Northeast 2nd Avenue and a central ovular park. He also envisioned an outdoor green market operating there on the weekends. Karp said the project was designed around the existing trees on the property.

“We wanted to maintain openness and green tree canopies of the site,” Karp said. “Towards Northeast 2nd Street, we present a plaza and green space so if people feel like they want to walk through our site, they can.”

In case passenger rail is ever extended on the FEC line running along the east side of the property, the site plan calls for a station there. The SAP would allow for a parking reduction of 30 to 50 percent should a train station be placed on the property.

The East Ridge SAP site plan shows 16 buildings, ranging from eight stories closer the the streets, to four buildings of 28 stories each around the park in the center of the property. Each building would have ground-floor retail and two would contain hotels. The office space would be combined with retail and apartments in the same buildings. Each building would contain some parking, with some garages under ground. The buildings would have green roofs with native vegetation and the parking structures would be topped by amenity decks.

Similar projects have been developed and proposed in parts of Miami-Dade County, such as in downtown Miami, Brickell and Aventura, but there’s nothing of this scale and design currently in Little Haiti. Karp pointed out that when he opened his office near Midtown Miami in 2004, that area had only mid-rise buildings and now it’s booming with large-scale development.

“The density that has existed there (the Design Place Apartments) for the past 80 years for it to keep with the new zoning code with the new parking and to introduce the retail and the offices there, the height is necessary, especially if you want to preserve and increase the green spaces,” Karp said.

The site plan calls for 6.8 acres of open space, more than triple what’s currently permitted under the present zoning. Karp said he created that open space by increasing the heights of the buildings so they have a smaller footprint at the ground level.

“The buildings could be shorter but then there would be less green space and open space,” Karp said.

If the Eastside Ridge SAP is approved by the UDRB, it would still need to pass the city’s Planning Board and commission. Kimley Horn is the planning firm on the project and Edward Martos is the developer’s attorney.

 

Source: SFBJ

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Terra Group Cancels $35 Million Offer For West Grove Assemblage

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David Martin’s Terra Group has canceled a $35 million offer for a group of 40 properties in the West Grove.

Yet, an attorney for Terra said at a bankruptcy hearing on Wednesday that the developer is still interested in buying the Coconut Grove land, which takes up the majority of six blocks from Elizabeth Street to Plaza Street, the Miami Herald reported. “Environmental concerns” killed the deal, attorneys said.

Terra’s interest in buying the properties, which are tied up in litigation, became public because two of the corporations that own the land filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Negotiations for a new contract will begin soon, with a hearing for the pending sale set for early January, the Herald reported.

The sale has been held up by infighting among partners Julio C. Marrero, Phillip Muskat, Orlando Benitez Jr. and others. Benitez, who reportedly stated that he brought Terra Group to the deal, tried to stop the sale in July. Marrero called him a “rogue stockholder,” the Herald previously reported.

Developer Peter Gardner had bid on the land in 2013, then asking $30 million, but the deal fell through. In July, the city of Miami sued the owners over poor living conditions and code violations at the dilapidated apartment buildings along Grand Avenue, Hibiscus Street and Florida Avenue.

If Terra ends up purchasing the properties, it would mark its first major foray into the West Grove. The Coconut Grove-based firm has developed and plans to develop more property on the east end of the Miami neighborhood.

 

Source: The Real Deal

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Spanish Billionaire Pays $500 Million For Iconic Downtown Miami Office Tower

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southeast-financial-center-5A company tied to Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega has paid more than $500 million for the Southeast Financial Center, a 55-story office tower in the heart of downtown Miami, according to a report in the Daily Business Review.

A source with knowledge of the deal confirmed the news to the Miami Herald.

This marks the second South Florida mega-purchase for Ortega, who owns the Zara fashion brand. Last year, Ortega paid $370 million for an entire stretch of Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Forbes lists Ortega as the world’s second-richest man with a net worth of $72.2 billion.

Financial giant JPMorgan owned the 1.2 million-square-foot tower at 200 S. Biscayne Blvd., which it put up for sale over the summer.

“It’s the largest single-building transaction in the history of Miami, to my knowledge,” said Ezra Katz, a commercial real estate investor who was not involved in the deal. “There is a very unique market for trophy properties. … It is clearly the finest location in town.”

 

Source: Miami Herald

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Wynwood Attracts Florida’s First Industrial Design College

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Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood, already a hub for artists, technologists and other creatives, will soon be the home of the new Miami College of Design.

It’s the vision of Walter Bender and Franco Lodato, experts in industrial design. The co-founders broke ground last month on the-state-of-the-art educational facility, which will be Florida’s first accredited college focused solely on industrial design, they said. The state-licensed associate and bachelor of science curricula will focus on a mentorship model and nature-inspired design methodologies. Selected students will be able to attend on generous scholarships provided by Bender and Lodato’s  IAM (Industrial Arts and Method) Foundation via donors and corporations. Lodato and Bender are aiming to open the college next fall.

“Ideas are cheap but knowing how to take an idea and make it into a product is rare,” said Bender, a longtime senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who also co-founded the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child. “Miami has become a hotbed of ideas. It’s young, it’s vibrant, what we want to do is add to that.”

The new college will be officially announced Wednesday by Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado, along with Bender and Lodato, to kick off the Masters of Tomorrow Summit, a conference bringing together design thinkers from around the world. The conference line-up, curated in partnership with the IAM Foundation, includes talks on virtual reality in film, using big data in climate change research, wearable fashion, smart luggage, incorporating “mindfulness” in design and other topics and ends with a free concert behind The LAB Miami.

The Miami College of Design will seek to advance the integration of design, science and engineering by taking students through a design process, exploring new approaches and solutions.

“The aim is human-centered and nature-inspired design that enhances the human experience, and our approach will be unconventional,” said Lodato, who previously headed design at Motorola and was a director at VSN Mobil Technologies in South Florida, among other roles, and has been collaborating with Bender on various projects for two decades.

Lodato pioneered “bionics,” the theory and practice of nature-inspired design. He has served as Master Innovator of wearable technologies for Google-Motorola and he led design for Herman Miller and Pininfarina. He holds 71 patents including one for the precursor of Gillette’s Mach3, and he has also consulted for Dupont, Coca-Cola, Ferrari-Maserati, Boeing and others.

Bender, president of the IAM Foundation, is also founder of the nonprofit Sugar Labs, a collaborative learning platform, and co-founder of One Laptop Per Child, which innovated distribution of laptops in third-world countries. He headed the MIT Media Lab and founded the MIT News in the Future Consortium, which helped launch the era of digital news.

Rendering shows the front of the Miami College of Design under construction in Wynwood

Rendering shows the front of the Miami College of Design under construction in Wynwood

About 18 months ago Lodato and Bender embarked on this college, acquiring the property and applying for a state license. The new building, designed by architect Fred Nagler of Pompano Beach, is under construction at 26 NE 25th St. They took off the front and rear of the two-story warehouse and expanded it, and are adding a third floor and rooftop garden as a social space, Lodato said. While the school is being constructed, the IAM Foundation will be doing workshops and seminars at The LAB Miami and other venues.

The curricula will be based on Bender and Lodato’s apprenticeship-driven education model that has close ties to industry. It will be project-based, and each student will work on a few projects hand in hand with professionals from the field who become their mentors.

“One of our goals in our model is that the students will be on 90 percent scholarships funded by industry. We already have raised funding for the first cohort of students. We really want students to focus on learning 100 percent, not on how they will pay for it. The work they do will be valuable for the industry,” Lodato said.

Miami is a natural location for the new school, they said.

“There is clearly an energy here but there is not a lot of history in the space in Miami. That means there is not a lot of rigid thinking – there is a lot more openness to ideas and new approaches,” said Bender. “It is a great opportunity for a vibrant, young community and at the same time the world has really opened up to this idea of entrepreneurship, of making, of doing. It’s the time. It’s the right time to be doing this.”

 

Source: Miami Herald

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Jorge Pérez: Come To Miami In 10 Years And Be Amazed

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Jorge Pérez thinks that Miami will be transformed in the next decade.

Pérez told Local 10 that visitors will be shocked by what they see in Miami in ten years from now.

“People are going to say oh my God, what’s happened here, this has become a world class city,” Perez said.

He also thinks that more Miami residents will be giving up their cars in favor of an urban lifestyle.

“I’ve always wanted to have Miami become an urban center like New York, Paris, London, in which people don’t have such a need for the automobile,” Pérez said.

Pérez said that he send a letter to president-elect and former business partner Donald Trump telling him “I’m here for you,” even though he supported Hilary Clinton during the election.

 

Source: The Next Miami

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