999 Ponce
The Consulate General of Guatemala is moving to the 999 Ponce building in Coral Gables.
William H. “Bill” Kerdyk Jr., president and CEO of Kerdyk Real Estate, said the consulate and its 20 employees should be in a new 5,072-square-foot space by the end of the month.
Lourdes Cuzan of Kerdyk Real Estate represented the consulate in its negotiations for a 10-year lease on the ground floor of the 13-story office building at 999 Ponce de Leon Blvd. John O’Neil of Cushman & Wakefield represented the landlord, 999 Ponce LLC.
The consulate will relocate from the sixth floor of 1101 Brickell Ave. in Miami, where it has operated for 25 years.
The Consulate General of Guatemala will be the 21st foreign mission to operate in Coral Gables.
Delray Beach Public Library
The Buzz Agency has returned to its former 1,000-square-foot location on the ground floor of the Delray Beach Public Library at 104 W. Atlantic Ave.
The Buzz Agency operated there from 2011 until 2019 when it moved to the office of Tradewinds, a boutique public relations firm Buzz Agency acquired in 2016, at 101 Bradley Place in Palm Beach. The Delray Beach space was taken over by the Murder on the Beach Bookstore.
When the bookstore closed, “we jumped at the opportunity to come home,” Buzz co-founder and partner Julie Mullen told the Business Journal.
The Buzz Agency’s old-new office includes a shared kitchen and a client meeting area. Six full-time and a part-time staffer are currently based in that office, though the agency is “looking to bring on another mid-level public relations manager,” Mullen said, and “if things keep moving in the direction they have been over the past six months, we definitely will need to continue hiring professional staff.”
In the last six months, the Buzz Agency obtained four additional clients, including Bethesda, Maryland-based Marriott International, The Mall at Wellington Green, Boca Raton personal injury firm Lesser, Lesser, Landy & Smith, and The Hanley Foundation in West Palm Beach.
150 E. Palmetto Park Road
Savills, a 167-year-old real estate company based in London with more than 40 offices in North America, recently expanded its South Florida presence with an office at 150 E. Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton.
The new office is led by David Browne, previously the managing partner of Delray Beach brokerage Jackson Browne LLC.
Savills (LON: SVS) has had an office in the Wells Fargo Center, at 333 S.E. Second Ave. in downtown Miami, for 20 years.
Also known as the Bank of America Tower, the eight-story 150 E. Palmetto Park Road building was built in 1969, according to property research website Reonomy. Boca-Raton based real estate firm Grover Corlew paid $44.6 million for the building in July. Available office space is being advertised on LoopNet.com for between $34 and $35 a square foot.
Downtown office rents among world’s highest
Office rents in South Florida’s central business districts are among the highest in the world, according to data collected by Santa Barbara, California-based proptech company Yardi.
Yardi and subsidiary Point2 examined asking rents within “desirable” central business districts across the globe, and cross-referenced them with international lease data from JLL, CBRE and Cushman & Wakefield. Most of the findings were published in an Aug. 4 Point2 report on global office rents.
According to those figures, the five most expensive office rents are outside of the U.S.: London ($163 a square foot), Tokyo ($123), Beijing ($112), Hong Kong ($112) and Paris ($97).
The five most expensive places in the U.S. are New York City’s Manhattan ($91 a square foot), San Francisco ($89), the San Francisco Bay Area ($86), Boston ($64), and Austin, Texas ($63).
Within Miami’s Brickell Financial District and CBD, the average asking rent was $58 a square foot, making it the seventh most expensive office market in the U.S. and tying with Sydney as the 19th most expensive in the world.
Downtown West Palm Beach’s office rent averaged at $62 a square foot, making it the sixth most expensive office market in the U.S. and the 18th most expensive in the world.
Both Miami and West Palm Beach had higher office rents than places such as Frankfurt, Germany ($57); Washington, D.C. ($54); Los Angeles ($53) and Shanghai ($50).
In downtown Fort Lauderdale, office rent averaged at about $45 a square foot, a rate that tied with New Delhi and higher than rent charged in Seattle ($44) and Dallas ($38).
The Big Number: $85.8 million
Amount of money the U.S. Department of Transportation funneled to five Florida infrastructure projects, including $24.9 million for safety improvements along the Florida East Coast Railway corridor used by Brightline and $16 million for upgrades at PortMiami
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