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Keystone plans 212-unit office-to-resi conversion near Dadeland Mall 

These building adaptions are common in the Northeast and rare in South Florida

Inside Keystone’s Office-to-Resi Conversion in Kendall
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Key Points

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This summary is reviewed by TRD Staff.
  • Keystone Development + Investment is converting two office buildings near Dadeland Mall in Kendall into 212 apartments.
  • Office-to-residential conversions are uncommon in South Florida, unlike in the Northeast, where they are more frequent.
  • The buildings' smaller floor plates and other structural features make them suitable for this type of conversion, which is part of Keystone's larger Hyve project.

Keystone Development + Investment is planning to create 212 apartments in Kendall through office-to-residential conversions, a rare adaptation in South Florida. 

Across the Northeast, developers have jumped on retrofitting office buildings into apartments, partly due to the growth of hybrid work. It’s especially common in New York, where projects are aided by tax breaks.

In South Florida, which emerged as an office real estate haven in the past five years due to an influx of out-of-state companies, office-to-resi conversions are uncommon. 

In the only known project of recent years, Keystone is converting the seven-story, 145,400-square-foot office building at 9400 South Dadeland Boulevard in unincorporated Miami-Dade County into 121 apartments, according to Keystone’s filings and the firm’s Randy Johnson, Southeast Region director. It is expected to be completed in the first quarter of next year. 

Next, Keystone plans to retrofit the eight-story, 113,100-square-foot office building at 9500 South Dadeland Boulevard into 91 apartments, according to filings and Johnson.  

The buildings are within Keystone’s 8.3-acre office complex with two garages near Dadeland Mall in unincorporated Miami-Dade. 

You don’t see a lot of conversion happen that often” in South Florida, Johnson said. “It’s very difficult because the economics don’t work. The other issue is it’s very difficult to make the buildings work. Many times the floor plates are too large, so you can’t make apartments work.”

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Keystone’s Kendall complex lends itself to conversion due to several factors, Johnson said. The office buildings have smaller floor plates, ranging from 13,000 square feet to 15,000 square feet at the 9500 South Dadeland Boulevard building, and averaging about 20,000 square feet at the 9400 South Dadeland Boulevard building. They also have poured-in-place concrete floors, which can be drilled through. Both buildings have large balconies on the top floors, an appealing feature for apartment buildings. Keystone also preserved elements such as elevators, elevator shafts and air conditioning chillers. And, the offices were depreciating in value, with slow rental growth and windows that were overdue to be replaced. 

“We are doing this conversion because it makes economic sense. We can make money,” Johnson said. 

The conversions are part of Keystone’s larger Hyve project on the site. A future phase includes a plan for a 25-story, 219-unit apartment tower with a parking podium in place of one of the existing garages. 

West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania-based Keystone, led by Bill Glazer, has done conversions in the Philadelphia area. 

In South Florida, developers generally opt to bulldoze aging buildings and build anew partly because the value is in the land, especially for properties near the coast, Johnson said. Reuse of old materials also is rare. 

Although office-to-resi isn’t common in the tri-county region, adaptive reuse of warehouses has been a trend for years. In downtown West Palm Beach, Place Projects, NDT Development and Wheelock Street Capital are converting a row of 13 warehouses along North Railroad Avenue into 150,000 square feet of retail and restaurants and 55,000 square feet of offices. It’s part of their 40-acre mixed-use Nora District between Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and Quadrille Boulevard, and between Dixie Highway and the FEC Railway tracks. 

In 2018, Johnstone Capital Partners finished renovating and retrofitting roughly 72,400 square feet of long overlooked warehouses, which were originally built from 1925 to 1974, in West Palm into retail, dining and office space. The portfolio includes the buildings at 1300, 1400, 1500 and 1220-1250 Elizabeth Avenue, and at 1615 Clare Avenue. 

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