The Miami Conservatory of Music/MCA Academy has signed a 7,989-square-foot lease at Mayfair Centre in Coconut Grove, CB Richard Ellis announced today.
The size of the lease is noteworthy in a struggling downtown Grove office market, where the average tenant is leasing around 2,000 square feet, said Chris Dekker, senior associate at CBRE, who represented Mayfair Centre with colleague Noel Steinfeld.
“The Grove has been tough,” he said. “We’ve been looking at a 23 percent vacancy factor, on a survey of 1.1 million square feet, so vacancy levels have been challenging.”
That mark is higher than the Miami-Dade County office market as a whole, which has stayed at about 16 percent, according to a recent report from Colliers International.
The Miami Conservatory of Music is one of several tenants in the area playing musical chairs, Dekker said. The group, which is joining tenants such as Sony Music, Crispin + Porter and architectural group Leo A Daly, is moving from its former location at 2860 Oak Avenue.
Mayfair Centre, a mixed-use building, is located at 3390 Mary Street in Coconut Grove. The building has around 260,000 square feet of office space.
According to Dekker, the average full-service rental rate. for the Grove office market is around $31 per square foot. That per-square-foot price, unlike the vacancy rate, is in line with the rest of the county, which is seeing rents of around $30.50 per square foot, according to Colliers.
The smaller Coconut Grove office market is competing against the newly expanded downtown Miami office corridor and that of nearby Coral Gables, where several firms have signed high-volume leases, including one for around 41,000 feet at the BAC Colonnade.
Just nearby, and across the street from the Conservatory’s former digs is the future headquarters of architectural firm Arquitectonica, which is building a two-story, environmentally friendly 18,000-square-foot complex at the corner of Oak Avenue and Rice Street.