Whole Foods Market bought its commercial space at downtown Miami’s Met3 for $21 million.
The national grocer, a subsidiary of billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Amazon, acquired the 97,674-square-foot ground-floor commercial unit and underground garage in the 32-story mixed-use tower at 299 Southeast Third Avenue, records and Vizzda show.
The deal breaks down to about $215 per square foot.
The seller, an affiliate of Atlanta-based commercial real estate investment firm Edens, paid $19.6 million for the space in 2015, the same year Whole Foods opened the store. Met3, which also includes the 462-unit Monarc at Met apartment tower and a nine-story garage, was built by MDM Development and ZOM.
The high-rise is part of the Metropolitan Miami complex which also includes the 40-story, 447-unit Met1 condominium, the 47-story Wells Fargo Center office building, the 313-key JW Marriott Marquis Miami, and Met Square, a 34-story tower with 188 apartments, an 80,000-square-foot Silverscreen Cinema and ground-floor retail.
More Whole Foods stores are on tap for South Florida. The grocer, which specializes in organic and healthy foods, will be the anchor retail tenant at Nema Miami, a mixed-use tower under construction at 2900 Biscayne Boulevard in Miami’s Edgewater neighborhood. Last year, the project’s developer, Miami-based Crescent Heights, secured a $224 million construction loan from Blackstone. In 2020, Whole Foods signed a 20-year lease with six five-year extensions.
Crescent Heights also recently secured Whole Foods as the anchor tenant for a planned 199,000-square-foot mixed-use project in Miami Beach, according to Traded.
In July, the owners of Uptown Boca announced that it had signed Whole Foods to open a store in the retail portion of the mixed-use project. In 2020, Schmier Property Group, Giles Capital Group and Rosemurgy Properties, in partnership with Wheelock Street Capital, completed Uptown Boca, which consists of 195,000 square feet of retail and restaurants near Boca Raton.
The same year, the joint venture sold Uptown Boca’s 456-unit apartment complex for $230 million to Atlanta-based Cortland.