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Owner of Pompano industrial park to triple warehouse space to 100K sf
Former owner of Festival Flea Market expects to finish building a trio of new warehouses by March
The former owner of the Festival Flea Market in Pompano Beach is tripling the size of a nearby warehouse development to more than 100,000 square feet, as part of a wave of investment in South Florida industrial properties.
By March 1, RS Associates of Florida expects to complete construction of three speculative, one-story warehouses totaling 71,440 square feet at its North Broward Commerce Center industrial park, said Douglas Meyer, executive vice president and chief financial officer of RS Associates.
Cushman & Wakefield is marketing the new warehouse space at a base rent just under $15 per square foot, he said. M-Engineering, a provider of maintenance services for high-performance sports cars, has pre-leased 2,500 square feet in one of the new warehouses and will occupy the space starting in March, Meyer added.
The three new warehouses are next to two existing, fully leased, one-story warehouses totaling 36,438 square feet. They are within the 9-acre North Broward Commerce Center, at 3420 Northwest 27 Avenue in Pompano Beach. The new warehouses will boost the total space in the industrial park to 107,878 square feet.
“We refer to it as flex space. It will be built with a lot of glass and windows, so you’ve got a lot of showroom capability,” Meyer said. “It’s a combination of showroom, office, and warehouse.”
He said American Eagle Granite, a tenant with 7,500 square feet in one of the existing warehouses, is planning to lease up to 1,500 additional square feet in one of the new warehouses.
The current group of tenants also includes a cabinet maker, a fabricator of yacht components, and suppliers of tools, golf merchandise, and plumbing parts. “Everybody is pretty much a sole proprietor,” Meyer said.
Pompano Beach-based RS Associates, a privately held real estate trust with a portfolio of commercial and industrial properties, sold the 37-acre site of the Festival Flea Market at 2900 Sample Road for $25 million in 2018, and the business itself for $31 million that year.
“We sold that and reinvested the proceeds into this project and other industrial assets,” Meyer said. “We just wanted to get out of retail. Even back then, we decided that retail really wasn’t something we wanted to be managing as an asset base, long term.”
The warehouse project at North Broward Commerce Center is emblematic of surging investment in industrial real estate. Last fall, city officials approved a proposal by Cordish Companies and Caesars Entertainment to add 1.5 million square feet of industrial space to their redevelopment of the 232-acre Isle Casino property in Pompano Beach.
This month, an affiliate of Blackstone Group bought an 18-acre industrial development site in Doral for $21 million, Boston-based STAG scooped up about 20 acres of industrial property in Palm Beach County for $32 million, and Illinois-based Centerpoint acquired two warehouses and land at a Hialeah business park for $184.4 million.