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Airport West leads growth in Miami-Dade industrial market

Miami’s Airport West submarket is leading the way for a strengthening Miami-Dade County industrial market, bolstered by last week’s signing of an 180,000-square-foot lease at AMB Property’s Blue Lagoon Business Park by package forwarding company Aeropost. The $10 million deal marks the largest industrial lease in South Florida so far this year.

 “That type of deal really helps tighten up the market with available space,” said Flagler Real Estate Service’s George Pino, who brokered the deal on behalf of owner AMB Property. “It was positive absorption for the market, and we really needed that.”

Airport West and the Miami market as a whole, have suffered less than other markets in part due to an emphasis on Latin American trade, according to Greg Zeifman, senior associate at Marcus & Millichap in Fort Lauderdale.

“Airport West has always been a healthy real estate market, and I expect it to continue to be very healthy,” he said, adding that the Miami market “has had a much softer landing compared to the national market.”

According to ComReal’s Ed Redlich, there have been 25 deals over 25,000 square feet in the past two quarters in the Airport West-West Dade-Medley market alone, totaling about 1 million square feet of transactions per quarter.

“If you go back to the first quarter of 2008, the largest deal was 20,000 square feet,” Redlich said. “Nobody was doing anything — after last year, when the early adopters were coming in and taking space, now there’s another wave of them in this first quarter.”

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Pino said buildings in the AMB portfolio had already signed over 500,000 square feet of transactions in the first quarter in Miami.

“The under-30,000-square-feet market is very well occupied,” Pino said. “When you get to 50,000 to 100,000 [square feet], that market is starting to tighten up, and I would predict by the end of this year you’ll probably see about 5 percent vacancy or less in that range.”

Among AMB’s signed leases this quarter was the 34,337-square-foot deal at Airport Business Center Park by logistics provider Nippon Express in March.

And just as Miami’s residential market has been buoyed by out-of-market buyers, a number of would-be tenants are coming to Airport West from other U.S. states looking to take advantage of Miami’s presence as the gateway to Latin America — and for two more compelling reasons.

“I see several customers coming from other states,” Redlich said. “They’re coming for two reasons — fleeing high taxation, but also for better weather.”

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