Prime buys Fort Lauderdale self-storage facility for $35M

Saratoga Springs, New York-based firm paid $375 psf for the building

Prime Group Holdings’ Robert Moser and the self-storage site at 2401 West Broward Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale
Prime Group Holdings’ Robert Moser and the self-storage site at 2401 West Broward Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale

Prime Group Holdings bought a self-storage facility in Fort Lauderdale for $35 million.

A Prime affiliate acquired Riverbend Self-Storage, a four-story building with 886 self-storage units at 2401 West Broward Boulevard, according to records. Led by CEO Bob Moser, the Saratoga Springs, New York-based buyer obtained a $19 million mortgage from Fidelity Bank.

The Storage Acquisitions Group, based in Chesapeake, Virginia, brokered the off-market deal, which breaks down to roughly $375 per square foot, according to a press release. The price per square foot set a new record for self-storage facilities in Broward County, beating the previous highest price per square foot by more than $35, the release states.

The seller, a joint venture between Fort Lauderdale-based companies Hernandez Development, Merrimac Ventures and Stiles, bought the 1.8-acre property for $2.5 million in 2019, records show. The 133,000-square-foot building, which also has about 5,200 square feet of ground-floor retail, was completed last year.

Sign Up for the undefined Newsletter

About 83 percent of Riverbend’s self-storage units are leased, and about 50 percent of the ground-floor retail is occupied, the release states.

Prime focuses on self-storage real estate, and owns more than 200 such facilities across the country, according to the firm’s website. Last year, Prime paid $12.3 million for an office building in Jupiter.

Self-storage real estate is booming in South Florida. More than 4 million square feet of new construction is in the pipeline, representing a 30 percent increase from last year, according to RentCafe. In the third quarter, the average monthly rent for a 10-foot-by-10-foot self-storage unit hit $168, a 17 percent increase compared to the same period of last year, RentCafe found.

Last month, San Antonio-based multifamily developer Lynd jumped into the self-storage sector. The company announced it is developing a $30 million self-storage building spanning 128,000 square feet near Dadeland Mall in Kendall, an unincorporated area in southwest Miami-Dade County.

In September, Torrance, California-based SecureSpace paid $22.7 million for a six-story self-storage building near Coral Gables.