Brickell Office Rents Are Now Higher Than Manhattan's. Six Blocks North, the CBD Is at 13% Vacancy.

MIAMI REALTORS' August office report puts Brickell at $79.7 per square foot and 7.3% vacancy. The Miami CBD asks almost the same rent with nearly double the empty space.

On August 28, MIAMI REALTORS chief economist Gay Cororaton published an office analysis with a headline number: asking rents in Brickell, at $79 per square foot, and the Miami central business district, at $78, now exceed Manhattan's $72. Across the Miami market area, average asking rent rose 5.3% year over year to $60.3 per square foot. Nationally, office asking rents rose 2.6% to $33.3.

The rest of the map

• West Palm Beach-Boca Raton led the nation's largest markets in rent growth, up 19.9% year over year to $50.6 per square foot.
• Coral Gables-Downtown is 75% Class A across 5.9 million square feet, with average asking rent of $67.2 and vacancy of just 8.0%.
• The CBD's 13.2% vacancy sits against Brickell's 7.3%. The rents are within two dollars of each other. The empty space is not.

My read

Hold this report next to the July 20 foreclosure auction, where two downtown CBD office towers sold for $15 million against a $65 million judgment. Both are true in the same quarter, six blocks apart. Trophy space in Brickell and Coral Gables commands New York rents with single-digit vacancy; older Class B and C stock in the CBD is repricing hard. For a business owner leasing space, the message is that Brickell's premium is real and not softening. For an investor, the spread between a full Class A building and an empty 1970s tower is where the next cycle's returns are. And for anyone selling a Brickell condo to a relocating executive, the office rent is the reason they are here.