A development site in the heart of downtown Miami’s jewelry district is hitting the market, and is expected to fetch more than $20 million.
Property records show a group of investors owns the Metro Mall building at 1 Northeast First Street, a 225,000-square-foot building that sits on a 33,750-square-foot corner lot. Colliers International South Florida’s Mika Mattingly, Gerard Yetming and Linn Ahsberg have the listing.
The site is zoned for 810,000 square feet, 774 units and at least 80 stories of development, Mattingly said. It doesn’t have an asking price, but based on the most recent comparable land sale in the area of $600 per square foot, the property could sell for $20.25 million. Land prices have ranged from about $500 per square foot to more than $700 per square foot.
Metro Mall Limited, Stanley Goldberg, Judith Jaffe and Joyce E. Goldberg own the building, which was built in 1926. “When [multiple] entities own it, it’s really hard to come to the consensus of what to do with the property, so they think the best thing to do is to sell it,” Mattingly said.
Colliers has already received interest from developers of jewelry buildings out of New York. That block alone in downtown Miami generated $850 million in wholesale jewelry sales last year, she added.
In recent years, prices for commercial properties in Flagler Street area of downtown Miami have soared, with developer and investor Moishe Mana leading the resurgence. Mana has spent more than $200 million downtown on buildings, parking lots and garages. A $13 million renovation and beautification of Flagler is underway, although the streetscape project has faced a number of delays since it began more than a year ago.