Beacon nabs Kendall office building for $20M

UPDATED, April 26, 2:45 p.m.: Beacon Real Estate Group acquired a Kendall office building for $20 million, as the sector rebounds from the pandemic.

An affiliate of the Coral Gables-based commercial real estate investment firm bought 117 Professional Arts Center at 11731 Mills Drive in southwest Miami-Dade County, records show.

Beacon Real Estate, led by Richard Kulick, Carlos Imery and Luis Aguirre, paid $316 a square foot for the 63,206-square-foot office building.

A Cushman & Wakefield team led by Miguel Alcivar and Dominic Montazemi represented the buyer and the seller, an affiliate of Miami-based The Green Companies, led by President James Bernstein. In 2019, The Green Companies paid $13.2 million for the four-story building that was completed in 2008.

During its ownership, The Green Companies increased 117 Professional Art Center’s occupancy from 85 percent to 100 percent, extended the average lease term for tenants to more than eight years and streamlined operational expenses, Alcivar said in a statement.

The building’s tenants include Vitas Healthcare Everglades University. The center’s stable, long-term credit cash flows was among the reasons Beacon Real Estate was interested in the property, Alcivar said.

Founded in 1967, Beacon Real Estate controls more than 10 million square feet of commercial real estate across the U.S., according to the company’s website.

In South Florida, the company previously owned a shopping center in Boca Raton that it sold in 2017. Beacon also sold the site for the Elysee Miami condo project in Edgewater to Two Roads Development in 2015 for $22 million, Imery said. Beacon paid $4 million for the property in 2011.

Miami-Dade’s office market is riding high, according to a recent JLL report. Average asking rents grew for the seventh straight quarter, up 10.2 percent in the first quarter, year-over-year, to $48.66 a square foot. Miami-Dade, overall, had a vacancy rate of 18.8 percent in the most recent quarter, the report states.

Another first quarter report by Cushman & Wakefield shows the Miami-Dade office market has rebounded since the start of the pandemic in 2020. The average asking rent was above $50 a square foot during the most recent quarter compared to under $50 a square foot during the same period in 2020. The overall vacancy rate tumbled from 20 percent in the first quarter of 2020 to below 15 percent in the most recent quarter, the report shows.

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the sale date and price of the Elysee Miami development site.