Coral Gables Office Park Trades For $76M, A 25% Discount From Last Sale
A Coral Gables office park traded for a nearly 25% discount despite the market’s recent rise as a popular destination for businesses looking for space outside Miami’s urban core.
Colonnade Properties paid $76M for the five-building Douglas Entrance office park in the northeast corner of Coral Gables, deed records compiled by property intelligence platform Vizzda confirm.
The 475K SF development was sold by Banyan Street Capital and Oaktree Capital Management a decade after the joint venture paid nearly $101M for the complex.
The West Palm Beach-based buyer assumed a $58M mortgage from Wells Fargo as part of the transaction. The loan was issued for $87M as part of the 2014 acquisition and increased to $100M in 2021.
The office park is nearly 80% leased, with the largest available space spanning 26K SF across two full floors, according to a spokesperson for Cushman & Wakefield, which handles leasing at the property. A leasing brochure for the property puts full-service rents between $36 and $38 per SF.
Douglas Entrance at 800 Douglas Road is a Spanish-inspired mix of historic and modern buildings on 5.5 acres accessed via an archway and bell tower that opens onto a private promenade. Its two oldest buildings, built in 1927, span 108K SF and include the three-story La Puerta del Sol and the two-story West Building.
Three office buildings built between 1985 and 1998 — the seven-story Executive Tower and the 12-story North and South towers — total 367K SF and are connected by a 12-story parking garage.
The Banyan Street and Oaktree JV, which was represented in the sale by CBRE Vice Chairman Christian Lee, spent at least $7M on renovations after acquiring the property, and the new ownership is considering a new capital improvement plan for amenities, the C&W spokesperson said. Plans are also in the works to add 13K SF of spec suites to a single floor in the North Tower.
Colonnade, Banyan Street and Oaktree didn’t respond to Bisnow’s requests for comment on the sale.
The Douglas Entrance sale is the latest in a series of office trades in Coral Gables, and it is at least the second to sell for a discount in the last year.
Miami-based firms Torose Equities, Lndmrk Development and Terranova Corp. paid $54M for the 220K SF office building at 255 Alhambra Circle in August. The seller, a fund managed by Deutsche Bank, acquired the 13-story building for just under $60M in 2006.
A month later, New York-based Princeton International Properties Corp. made its first South Florida acquisition with the $90M purchase of 355 Alhambra Circle, a 223K SF office tower sold by PGIM Real Estate.
As in the latest sale, the properties that traded last year were also slated to undergo renovations.
Coral Gables is seeing significant office leasing activity as tenants expand beyond the urban core where rents saw rapid growth, driven by pandemic-era deals.
FIFA opened a 60K SF office in the neighborhood late last year, and The Plaza Coral Gables, a mixed-use project that delivered 455K SF of offices two years ago, is nearly 90% leased. Six tenants signed 65K SF of new deals at the property in October, including two relocations from Miami’s financial district, Brickell.
The market’s average Class-A asking rents were $53.80 per SF at the end of the year, according to Cushman & Wakefield, just more than half the $102.59 per SF average in Brickell and priced below Miami’s other popular office destinations like Downtown, Wynwood and Miami Beach.
