Trending
HighBrook Investors buys three Miami-Dade warehouses for $33M
Properties house logistics company Seaboard Warehouse Terminals
A New York real estate private equity firm picked up three Miami-Dade warehouses — a month after partnering with another company to buy an industrial park near Doral.
An affiliate of HighBrook Investors, led by founder Brian R. Carr and senior managing partner David Patrick O’Connor, paid $33 million for the trio of industrial buildings at 3455 Northwest 54th Street, 5530 Northwest 32nd Court and 5400 Northwest 32nd Court, records show. HighBrook obtained a $57 million mortgage from an affiliate of Rialto Capital Management.
The deal surpasses Brookfield Asset Management’s $26.3 million purchase of Bristol Logistics Center in Doral, which marked the biggest industrial sale of the second quarter, according to a recent Avision Young report.
The seller of the three warehouses is Seaboard Warehouse Terminals Ltd., a logistics company led by president Andrew Blank, whose family has owned the business since 1952, according to its website. The three warehouses total 292,755 square feet and were completed between 1959 and 1970, records show. Seaboard also has operations in Tampa and Chicago.
The Blank family has deep ties to Miami. In 1925, after migrating from New York, patriarch Sam Blank founded National Brands, which was Florida’s largest institutional wholesale grocer and the world’s largest Anheuser-Busch beer distributor until 1984 when the Blanks sold the distributorship, according to Seaboard Warehouse’s website. Sam Blank was also a key figure in the establishment of the Greater Miami Jewish Federation and Mount Sinai Hospital, according to the Blank Family Foundation website.
In August, HighBrook partnered with Orlando-based Foundry Commercial to buy the 147,000-square-foot Americas International Center at 9300-9380 Northwest 13th Street in Doral. The firms paid $18 million. According to its website, HighBrook acquires and manages property investments across North America and Europe that are typically in need of repositioning and restructuring.
The pandemic has provided rocket fuel for South Florida’s industrial market, as e-commerce and logistics firms are experiencing record growth from online sales. Since last year, Miami-Dade’s industrial investment activity rose to $1.5 billion in the second quarter, according to Avision Young. Prices for industrial properties climbed 18.5 percent, year over year.
Since the start of the pandemic, industrial base rents in Miami-Dade increased by 9.5 percent to $9.51 a square foot, and net absorption in the second quarter was 2.1 percent, compared to 0.9 percent during the same period of last year.