Large Miami development site up for sale

The longtime owner of a big box retail development site at the southern entrance of Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood has decided the time is right to test the market, The Real Deal has learned.

Nearly 7.4 acres at the northwest corner of Northeast 17th Street and Second Avenue are being marketed for sale by owner BDB Miami, according to real estate firm CBRE, which is handling the sale. Hanover, Md.-based BDB has owned the site for nearly a decade and previously planned a large retail development called Bayview Market. It received approvals for 550,000 square feet of big box retail but never started construction before the recession took hold.

The existing permit has extension options if the eventual buyer wanted to develop a similar project, according to CBRE senior vice president Gerard Yetming, who is marketing the site with vice chairman Robert Given and senior vice presidents Casey Rosen and Timothy Gifford. Under the Miami 21 zoning code, the new owner could potentially build at least two million square feet on the land.

Yetming noted the neighborhood could use an influx of traditional retailers to serve the growing residential population.

“Either way this would be a massive project,” he said. “It is sort of at the nexus of everything going on in Miami right now.”

Condo developers are aggressively targeting Edgewater, which has at least 10 residential towers currently proposed for the area. That is driving land prices up. In one of the most recent transactions, a company tied to Russian mining oligarch Oleg Baybakov paid $21.5 million last month for an Edgewater property that sold for $9.9 million in August 2012.

CBRE does not have a set asking price for the BDB site.

“It’s a great seller’s market,” Yetming said. “All owners in the area are probably evaluating their options.”