Brick & Timber closes on $62M purchase of Cube Wynwd

Brick & Timber Collective closed on its third building in Miami’s Wynwood neighborhood.

Brick & Timber paid $62 million for Cube Wynwd, an office property at 222 Northwest 24th Street, according to sources. The sellers, Ben Mandell’s Tricera Capital and Alex Karakhanian’s Lndmrk Development, kept a roughly 20 percent stake in the building, sources involved in the deal said.

JPMorgan Chase provided the buyer with a roughly $36 million acquisition loan, sources said.

Brick & Timber put the property under contract roughly 10 months ago.

Tony Arellano and Devlin Marinoff of Dwntwn Realty Advisors represented the sellers and buyer. Scott Wadler of Berkadia represented the buyer in the financing deal.

The deal comes as the nationwide office market has taken a hit from rising interest rates and looming doubt of a full return to cubicles. Even in South Florida, a hot office leasing market, investment deals nosedived in the latter half of this year.

The eight-story Cube Wynwd with a rooftop spans roughly 100,000 square feet. It’s fully leased, with Northeastern University opening next year on the entire fifth floor, where it will offer a graduate program targeting the fintech industry, according to sources. Other tenants include Blockchain.com, Ecuadorian fintech firm Kushki, investment adviser Shaolin Capital Management, coworking firm Spaces, Brazilian footwear manufacturer Grendene, office supply and furniture online retailer Poppin and tech firm Transmit.

RedSky Capital and JZ Capital Partners completed the building in 2019. The following year, Tricera Capital and Lndmrk, both based in Miami, paid $28 million for Cube Wynwd.

San Francisco-based Brick & Timber made its South Florida debut in February, dropping $49 million for The Annex office building at 215 Northwest 24th Street, across from Cube Wynwd.

On the heels of that deal, it purchased the office and retail building at 2724 and 2734 Northwest First Avenue, also in Wynwood, for $9 million in May.

Led by founder Glenn Gilmore and managing partner Jesse Feldman, Brick & Timber is a developer and real estate manager. It has a portfolio of roughly 300,000 square feet of offices worth over $250 million in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California and now Miami, sources said.

South Florida’s office market is somewhat self-contradictory. Deal volume dropped 37 percent in the third quarter, year-over-year, according to real estate database Vizzda. (TRD confirmed with Colliers researchers that they use Vizzda and it’s a credible source.)

Yet, asking rents at Class A projects in the pipeline have hit a record of over $100 per square foot amid an influx of out-of-state firms.

Feldman, of Brick & Timber, echoed this paradox. “It’s a complex financing environment right now,” he said. “We are actively signing new leases in both markets [Miami and Bay Area] every day. I think the silver lining to the current economic condition is that companies that will survive over the next few years are largely calling people back into the office or are already working from the office.”

Average asking rents across Miami-Dade County hit $49.90 a square foot in the third quarter. Wynwood and the nearby Miami Design District have enjoyed healthy leasing activity and higher rates, according to a Colliers report. Office buildings in the two neighborhoods now are asking an average $78 a square foot.

Read more

South Florida

Inside Griffin's billion-dollar South Florida property play

South Florida

South Florida office sales falter, despite strong leasing

South Florida

South Florida office rents climb again