The failure of Spirit Airlines left a six-story, 180,000-square-foot hole in Dania Beach’s office market, but candidates are on stand-by to fill the space, including Broward County’s government.
The Broward County Commission next week will consider buying the Spirit headquarters for a new county governmental center instead of building a new one in downtown Fort Lauderdale.
Developing a governmental center is expected to cost $400 million to $500 million, said Broward County Commissioner Michael Udine, who put the Spirit item on the commission’s agenda.
Buying a building instead of developing could save the county a huge chunk of change, as the Spirit HQ likely will be offered at a significant discount to its development cost, Udine said.
“I’ve seen numbers bandied about in a range from $150 million to $200 million,” he said.
Spirit Airlines opened its Dania Beach headquarters just two years ago as the centerpiece of a four-building, 11-acre corporate campus that cost $250 million to build at Dania Pointe, a development with residences, restaurants, retail and entertainment venues.
Brokers say the headquarters is unlikely to sit on the market in any case.
“There’s a decent chance someone else will want that for their own headquarters,” said Jaimie Sturgis, founder and CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based Native Realty. “It’s a great location, right by the airport and all that Dania Pointe offers.”
The vacated headquarters is just south of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, which was Spirit’s largest operating base. Spirit permanently ceased operations last Saturday after its parent company filed for bankruptcy.
Another airline would be the best fit, said Bob Swindell, president and CEO of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance, an economic development agency.
“I’ve actually had conversations with another aviation chairman, making the case that South Florida would be a good location, if not for a full headquarters, for a regional headquarters,” Swindell said.
He singled out low-cost carrier JetBlue, based in New York, as a potential taker of Spirit’s headquarters and adjacent training center.
Before the 2024 collapse of JetBlue’s planned merger with Spirit, due to an unfavorable court ruling on antitrust grounds, JetBlue executives had committed to occupy Spirit’s headquarters after the planned merger, Swindell said.
“They were totally on board, literally to the point we were talking about changing the color scheme of the building, and that was before the building had been completed,” he said.
Kimco Realty developed Dania Pointe and the Spirit Airlines campus but later sold the headquarters and training building to Spirit.
Investors “with a large tenant in tow,” are another potential buyer pool, said South Florida CRE expert Ken Krasnow of Cushman & Wakefield.
“There’s going to be a wide range of new-to-market companies that would consider a Florida relocation, save for the fact that it would take three years to build a building,” Krasnow said. “There’s certainly a big demand here for new, large Class A blocks of space. That’s generally a scarce commodity throughout South Florida.”
Spirit Airlines got a package of publicly funded financial incentives to move its headquarters staff from Miramar to Dania Beach, and similar incentives could be offered to encourage a new occupant to move into the Spirit headquarters, Swindell said.
“If it’s a big financial services firm that would take 180,000 square feet, I’d be hard-pressed to say that we couldn’t work something out with the county and the state to do something special for a user of that size,” he said.