Charles Cohen Plans a $350 Million Spec Office Project in Dania Beach Two Years After Losing a Building to Foreclosure

Charles Cohen plans a pair of office buildings at 1805 and 1815 Griffin Road in Dania Beach, estimated to cost $350 million and called Office Center of the Americas. Commercial Observer confirmed the project and its context, which is that Cohen is developing again after a foreclosure. Bisnow carried it on September 10 as a $350 million office project planned after he resolved his debt situation. The announcement comes about two years after Cohen lost the nearby Design Center of the Americas in foreclosure, and The Real Deal reported that in June he announced he had paid off the full judgment tied to his previous foreclosure issues.

What is planned

The Real Deal reported the specifications: 400,000 square feet of offices in 10-story buildings, each with a four-story garage, floorplates spanning up to 14,000 square feet, and towers connected by landscaped terraces and promenades. Cooper Horowitz is working on the project's construction financing. It would be Cohen Brothers Realty's second planned office project in South Florida. Those details come from one outlet and I could not verify them elsewhere, so read them as reported rather than confirmed. What two independent outlets do confirm is that the project exists, the cost estimate is $350 million, and the foreclosure that defined Cohen's last two years in this market is behind him.

My read

Speculative office is the hardest thing to finance in commercial real estate right now. A developer proposing $350 million of it in Broward, two years after losing a building on the same road, is either reading demand that the rest of the market has not priced yet or is very early. I lean toward the first, because nobody gets a construction lender to even engage on spec office without leasing conversations already happening in the background. That said, here is the discipline I would apply, and the same discipline applies to anything you read about a South Florida project this week. Confirmed: the project, the price tag, the location and the resolved judgment. Single-sourced: the square footage, the floorplate sizes, the garage counts and the financing broker. Not happened yet: a closed construction loan. Until a mortgage records against 1805 and 1815 Griffin Road, this is a plan. Plans in Broward office have a real failure rate, and I would not reprice a nearby asset off an announcement.