After losing its anchor tenant, the Bank of America Tower at International Place Miami has a new name, which its owners hope won’t be in place very long.
Fairchild Partners, the management team for newly christened Miami Tower, is actively negotiating to find a new tenant that could assume the lucrative naming rights, after Bank of America’s departure, but the current climate may yield few results.
Management for Miami Tower — acclaimed for its changing palette of exterior lighting schemes — will give the first tenant to sign a lease for at least 80,000 square feet the naming rights at no additional cost. Miami Tower can offer up to 76,000 square feet of contiguous space per floor. [more]

The former Bank of America Tower at International Place, an icon of the downtown Miami skyline, needs a new corporate naming rights purchaser to maximize the 600,000-square-foot, 47-story building’s earning potential. Fairchild Partners, the leasing and marketing agency for the I.M. Pei-designed skyscraper, is seeking a new partnership for the naming rights, a deal that would be worth millions of dollars. Tony Puente, senior vice president with Coral Gables-based Fairchild, said the tower has been a fixture in the city since it opened, and remains a feature in the promotional credits for the television show CSI Miami. He said tenants like the idea that they can locate their business in the heart of the city, a factor that helped in 62,000 square feet of leasing in 2009, including a 34,536-square-foot renewal by UBS Financial Services valued at $7.5 million over its five-year term.
[GlobeSt]

From left: Arbor Oaks at Boca Raton, the Compson Financial Center in
Boca Raton, Bank of America Tower in Miami, and the Caribbean South
Beach in Miami

Sparse credit and a looming wave of commercial mortgage-backed
securities defaults dominated the year in South Florida commercial real
estate. Rents fell, vacancies rose. The bottom never quite showed
itself, despite the concerted hopes of landlords, lenders and brokers. Real estate pros say that there will be more of the same in 2010. Despite the market woes, some notable commercial real estate deals got
inked in 2009. The Real Deal offers up its picks for the top five such deals, marked by
large office leases, healthy renewals, mega sales and lessons in
discounting. Comments

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Regional commercial landlords want bodies in their office buildings and are willing to go to greater and greater lengths to keep them there. With more than 1.2 million square feet of space are on the way, landlords must scramble. The Rilea Group’s 576,379-square-foot 1450 Brickell project is to be completed in the first quarter of 2010, while MDM Development plans an April 2010 completion for the 750,000-square-foot Met 2 Financial Center project. Owners of the Wachovia Financial Center, Bank of America Tower at International Place and 800 Brickell are pumping millions of dollars into improving their buildings. They hope the improvements and their established quality of their properties will keep current tenants and lure new ones. [GlobeSt]

Call it a low-cost flight to quality. Vacancy rates in Miami’s office market have eclipsed the 15 percent mark for
the first time in five years, and many landlords face a dilemma: make
concessions or face the possibility that vacancy rates could climb
higher. Most are choosing the former, attracting new businesses to the
urban core. “There’s no doubt about it. We’re seeing a flight to quality as
companies are in the market to trade up. Tenants, particularly those
who have been in their current premises for a long time or are in
multiple locations, are looking to do deals,” said Tere Blanca,
principal of Blanca Commercial Real Estate in Miami. The phenomenon takes center stage in the Downtown Miami office market,
which will have nearly 2 million square feet of Class A office space
freed up or newly completed in 2010. Blanca said market conditions
create what could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for businesses to
move up in quality at a more affordable rate. [more]

UBS Financial Services has renewed its $7.5 million, five-year lease for 34,536 square feet at Miami’s Bank of America Tower. The renewal is the tower’s sixth so far in 2009 and the largest of the year. Tony Puente, senior vice president of Fairchild Partners, represented the landlord, Wealth Capital Management. Colleen B. Newcomer, president of CBN Commercial Real Estate Services, represented UBS Financial Services. Bank of America Tower is now 92 percent occupied. TRD [more]