Walkability Is Trendy, But Demand Still Strong For Suburban Buildings With Parking

Despite all of the buzz about walkable neighborhoods and self-driving cars, most of America still needs solid suburban office buildings — with plenty of parking.

That is the key takeaway from the saga — or rather the sweet, short story— of Pembroke Pointe 880, a 144K SF Class-A office building in Broward County at 880 SW 145th Ave.

Avison Young's Q3 report on the Broward County office market warned tenants were moving away from Downtown Fort Lauderdale due to high rents.

"This trend is reflected by negative absorption in the [central business district] and continued positive absorption in suburban submarkets such as Cypress Creek, Southwest Broward and Plantation," the report states. "In fact, as of the third quarter, there was nearly 50K SF of negative absorption in Downtown Fort Lauderdale and 600K SF of positive absorption outside the CBD."

The Pembroke Pointe 880 project exemplifies the trend. It was developed by Duke Realty in 2015. Duke hired Cushman & Wakefield to handle leasing in 2016. Cushman's office leasing team has brought it to 86% occupancy, with tenants including Elizabeth Arden cosmetics and DeVry Education Group. Then Cushman's capital markets team helped make a sale.

Public records show the building sold to Pembroke Pointe Office LLC, an affiliate of Miami-based Midtown Capital Partners LLC, for $42M, financed with a $22.7M long-term acquisition loan secured with Cushman's international Equity, Debt and Structured Finance platform.

According to Cushman, key selling points were the building's parking spaces (5.5 per 1K rentable SF) and Interstate 75 frontage.