Fairlead buys Fort Lauderdale’s Bayview Corporate Tower for $56M

Fairlead Commercial Real Estate has made landfall in Fort Lauderdale’s office market.

The Georgia-based investment firm just paid $56.3 million to buy the Bayview Corporate Tower from the New Boston Fund, according to Broward County records, marking yet another big-ticket office trade in the coastal city.

Bayview is a 12-story office building at 6451 North Federal Highway, housing 413,426 square feet of Class A office space. Fairlead’s purchase price breaks down to $136 per square foot.

Requests for comment to both Fairlead and New Boston Fund were not immediately returned. The sale was off-market with no brokers involved.

According to data from the CoStar Group, the building is 75 percent leased, with its largest tenant healthcare staffing company CompHealth occupying 54,671 square feet. Whole Foods Market is also a tenant. Average asking rents are $17 per square foot, triple net.

New Boston purchased the Bayview tower in 2007 for $63 million, or about $152 per square foot, though that deal also included nearly 10 acres of land. The investment and development firm later split off 1.57 acres and sold it to the Related Group for $6.75 million, which turned around and built an apartment complex. That complex was sold earlier this year to the Berkshire Group for $78.5 million.

Fairlead’s acquisition is the latest in a string of large office deals in Fort Lauderdale. In terms of price, the most comparable is Ivy Realty’s $56 million purchase of the two-building Tower 101 complex, which it bought from partners Banyan Street Capital and PCCP for $248 per rentable square foot.