Boutique Miami Beach Office To Be Pritzker Prize Winner's First U.S. Project
A New York-based development firm is doubling down on Miami Beach office, bringing in a Pritzker Prize winner to design its second building in the city’s South of Fifth neighborhood.
Sumaida + Khurana is planning a five-story office building at 1100 Fifth St. designed by Eduardo Souto de Moura, marking the first project in North or South America from the award-winning Portuguese architect. The 93K SF building is planned just two blocks from the developer’s first office project in the neighborhood, which broke ground in May.
The L-shaped, 0.75-acre parcel on the corner of Fifth Street and Alton Road is across from the MacArthur Causeway. The developers plan to tear down the Burger King and vacant Pier 1 Imports storefront on the site in spring 2025, with the office building scheduled to deliver in 2026, according to a news release.
“The location of our project at Fifth & Alton presented us with a truly significant and monumental opportunity to develop a gateway building, a structure one first sees when entering a city,” Saif Sumaida, founding partner of Sumaida + Khurana, said in a statement.
Plans submitted to the Miami Beach Planning Board, which will consider the proposal on April 25, include a 7K SF ground-floor restaurant, 105 parking spaces on the second floor and around 48K SF of office space on the top three floors.
Sumaida + Khurana is partnering on the project with the property’s owners, Roslyn and Norton Nesis and Robert and Miriam Weiss of New Jersey-based Weiss Properties. The partners paid $22M for the property in 2014, property records indicate. The development partnership was structured by Aaron Butler of Miami Beach-based Avenue Real Estate Partners.
The developer has already secured financing for the building’s construction, a spokesperson for the firm said in an email, declining to provide further details.
Along with Souto de Moura, the developers tapped Miami-based Zyscovich as the executive architect and New York-based Gabellini Sheppard to design the interiors.
Sumaida + Khurana’s first office project in the Miami Beach neighborhood is a 60K SF building called The Fifth Miami Beach, which it is developing in partnership with Bizzi + Bilgili, a Turkish development firm with an office in New York. Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, is also a co-owner of the building, Bloomberg reported.
Cain International provided a $43.7M construction loan for the five-story project in December. It is slated to deliver in 2025 and secured its first tenant in February, with the Manhattan-based hedge fund J. Goldman & Co. signing on for 10K SF.
The developer is in lease negotiations with several other potential tenants for The Fifth, Sumaida told Bisnow Friday.
Miami Beach offices, with a total inventory of just 1.4M SF in mostly boutique buildings, command some of the highest rents in the market. Average Class-A asking rents in the city were $78.42 per SF at the end of the year, behind only Miami’s financial district of Brickell and the creative hubs of Wynwood and the Design District, according to Cushman & Wakefield.
Rents at The Fifth were expected to reach $170 per SF when the project was announced in October 2022, Bloomberg reported.
New York developer Michael Shvo is also looking to capitalize on beachside office demand. In December, the Miami Beach Design Board approved his plan for The Alton, a six-story building with 170K SF of office space, 17K SF of ground-floor retail and five luxury condos at the intersection of Alton Road and the Lincoln Road shopping district.
Shvo also plans a six-story building with 21K SF of offices at 1667 Washington Ave.
“Miami Beach and the South of Fifth enclave has emerged as one of the most sophisticated neighborhoods in the world,” Amit Khurana, Sumaida + Khurana’s other founding partner, said in a statement.
