An affiliate of Accesso Partners, a private real estate investment trust based in Hallandale Beach, sold a four-story office building in the Golden Glades Office Park in Miami Gardens for $5.1 million, The Real Deal has learned.
The buyer was the Lubavitch Educational Center, whose main campus is less than a mile away. The 48,681-square-foot building at 1525 Northwest 167th Street was the last unsold portion of an eight-building office park built in the early 1970s. The price breaks down to $105 per square foot. The sale has not yet cleared records.
When Accesso bought the property six years ago, executives “thought that they were purchasing an excellent investment property, because of [the desirability] of the tenants and the location, next to the Golden Glades [interchange],” Ted Konigsberg, president of Miami Lakes-based Infinity Commercial Real Estate, who represented the seller, told TRD. At the time, the tenant roster in the park included multiple for-profit schools, a medical testing company and the city of Miami Gardens, which housed its government center there.
When the for-profit ATI College of Health went out of business at the 1525 building, Accesso had to find a similar tenant or rebuild the space for another use, Konigsberg said. Although other for-profit colleges rented space in the building, they also went out of business, he said.
Konigsberg said buildings in the Golden Glades Office Park generally sell for about $120 per square foot. Today, the cost of replacing one of those buildings would be more than double that, he said. Still, an investor does not usually want to put a lot of money into an existing building such as those in the Miami Gardens park to attract new tenants when the return on investment would only be about 5 percent, he said. “That is why we repositioned our sales efforts to go after owner/users,” he said.
“An owner/user will always pay more than an investor,” he added, which is why Accesso found the Lubavitch Educational Center an attractive buyer. Lubavitch will use the building as an extension of its school, he said.