A familiar face made a big move last week with the $140 million purchase of 11 storefronts on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.
Michael Comras’ Comras Company plans to redevelop the properties into a 150,000-square-foot boutique shopping district called NoLi — short for North Lincoln Road.
In 2015, the retail developer and broker sold 1001-1035 Lincoln Road for $370 million. The buyer was Pontegadea, the family office of Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega.
Now Comras is back in a big way. He has scooped up nearly a dozen storefronts, mostly along the 700 and 800 blocks of Lincoln Road. Current tenants include The Cheesecake Factory, Salt & Straw, It’Sugar and Lincoln Eatery on Lincoln Lane. Comras is designing NoLi as a pedestrian retail experience, lined with boutique storefronts and cafes with outdoor seating and centered around a fountain and landscaping.
His investment is another sign of the next era for Lincoln Road. Record rents ($150 to $300 per square foot) set years ago resulted in record vacancies, and a number of storefronts sit empty. National tenants have moved onto competing neighborhoods like the Miami Design District and Wynwood. Even the movie theater shuttered.
As investor and developer Scott Sherman put it in an interview last month, “the street lost its energy.”
But landlords and brokers suggest that the doom-and-gloom narrative will soon be in the past.
Sherman returned to the street last year after nearly a decade, and paid $10.4 million for a property that’s leased to the clothing store AllSaints. Now that rents have come down, “the street’s affordable enough for creative operators to come back,” he said.
Broker Stephen DeMeo agreed about the need for creativity. The street, she said, “needs activation — pop-up stores, rooftop events, wellness studios [and] cultural tie-ins.”
What we’re thinking about: What’s Miami Mayor Francis Suarez’ next move? Send me a note at kk@therealdeal.com.
CLOSING TIME
Residential: The waterfront single-family home at 905 Belle Meade Island Drive in Miami sold for $22.1 million. Miami-based developer Nouri Group sold the house to reality star Sam Logan.
Commercial: Billionaire Citadel founder Ken Griffin sold the 48,600-square-foot former Neiman Marcus building at 151 Worth Avenue in Palm Beach for $80.5 million to West Palm Beach-based TZ Capital.
— Research by Mary Diduch
NEW TO THE MARKET
Former Manalapan Mayor Stewart Satter, a spec developer who made his fortune in the consumer testing industry, re-listed his property in the town for $75 million. The 4-acre ocean-to-Intracoastal lot at 1960 South Ocean Boulevard in Manalapan is listed with Nick Malinosky of The Exclusive Group at Douglas Elliman. Earlier this year, Satter announced plans to develop a spec mansion on the property, listed for $285 million. Now he’s listing the land, with plans for the 55,000-square-foot estate. Satter paid $27.5 million for the ocean-to-Intracoastal Waterway property last year.
A thing we’ve learned:
Miami commissioners deferred a vote on a Watson Island land sale to their Dec. 11 meeting. The Motwani family’s Merrimac Ventures and BH3 plan to develop a plot on the south side of the island into a mixed-use project with a condo component. At a meeting last week, Merrimac’s Nitin Motwani said the local joke that the island is cursed “feels more and more real every day because it’s been three years now, and every time we’re making two steps forward, we end up making three steps back.”
Elsewhere in Florida
- The Trump administration’s proposal to open a large stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast to offshore drilling drew opposition from Gov. Ron DeSantis, who cited a 2020 Trump memo that protects the coast until 2032, the Tallahassee Democrat reports.
- Florida Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick was indicted on charges that she and her brother diverted a $5 million FEMA overpayment to secretly fund her congressional campaign, according to the New York Times. Cherfilus-McCormick represents Florida’s 20th Congressional District, which includes parts of Broward and Palm Beach counties.
- Donald Trump’s presidential library foundation plans to raise nearly $1 billion in tax-exempt donations over the next two years for a high-rise library in downtown Miami, according to the Miami Herald. That amount is nearly 50 times what Barack Obama’s library raised in its first three years.