Miami accounting firm pays $17M for Blue Lagoon office building

Accounting firm Benitez & Co.’s principals rang up a $16.9 million purchase in Miami’s Blue Lagoon neighborhood, acquiring a four-story office building with a helipad.

Juan and Maria Benitez bought the roughly 61,000-square-foot Waterford Corporate Centre at 5835 Blue Lagoon Drive, said their broker, Manny Chamizo III with One Sotheby’s International Realty. The deal breaks down to about $276 a square foot.

Cary Cohen with Blanca Commercial Real Estate represented the seller, an entity managed by Doug Davis of Islip, New York. In 2017, Davis bought the building from TA Realty for $10.5 million, records show.

Miami-based Benitez & Co. will be moving its headquarters from 9100 Coral Way into Waterford Corporate Centre, Chamizo said.

“They were looking at a number of other properties,” he said. “This became the top one because of the quality of the building, its location and the tenant quality.”

The property hit the market in July without an asking price, Cohen said.

“We had over 10 offers,” he said. “The buyers did upfront due diligence…and were very aggressive in wanting to acquire the property.”

Completed in 1998 and renovated in 2019, Waterford Corporate Centre is 97 percent leased with a tenant roster that includes the U.S. Department of Commerce, the Florida Department of Education, Volvo Group North America and World Trade Center Miami, according to an offering.

The buyer can increase the building’s income by a minimum of 25 percent by increasing rents as leases rollover, the offering states.

A spreadsheet attached to the offering shows projected annual rental revenue of $1.3 million and roughly $750,000 in expenses between this November and October of next year. A 10-year pro-forma shows the new landlord could be raking in $2.6 million in annual rental revenue by the end of the decade, while total expenses would not exceed $790,000.

Miami’s Blue Lagoon neighborhood is a mix of office, multifamily and hotel properties fronting a lagoon adjacent to the Dolphin Expressway and Miami International Airport. In April, Miami-based Valoro Capital paid $18 million, or $218 a square foot, for a nine-story office building near Blue Lagoon. Last year, Greenville, South Carolina-based RealOp Investments bought three office buildings in Blue Lagoon’s Waterford Business District for $110.1 million.

In 2020, Ivy Realty, a Montvale, New Jersey-based real estate investment firm, sold a Blue Lagoon office building for $30.2 million, or $233 a square foot.