Verizon Office Could Be Redeveloped With Warehouse

Prologis aims to demolish the Miami-Dade County office building of Verizon Communications subsidiary TracFone Wireless in order to build warehouses.

San Francisco-based Prologis filed an administrative modification application with county officials for the 18.5-acre site at 9700 NW 112th Ave., in the Flagler Station business park near Doral.

Prologis acquired the property from TracFone for $54.5 million in August.

It currently has a 145,352-square-foot office building that was constructed in 2000. Verizon plans to vacate the building.

In the application, Prologis said it aims to replace that office with warehouse under the rules of the Flagler Station Development of Regional Impact (DRI) that covers the entire business park. It’s allowed to convert office uses into industrial based on generating an equivalent amount of traffic. Since industrial generates less traffic than office, Prologis could build a much larger warehouse than the size of the current office building.

Prologis didn’t submit a specific site plan for the property. However, the developer provided a study showing the 145,352-square-foot TracFone office is equivalent to 562,000 square feet of industrial. There’s also unbuilt office and warehouse space in the Flagler Station DRI, so potentially another 1 million square feet of industrial could be developed in the business park.

Miami-based attorney Tracy R. Slavens, who represents Prologis in the application, said his client hasn’t identified a specific design for the project, but 1 million square feet of new industrial would likely be too much.

This continues a trend of suburban office space in South Florida being redeveloped as industrial. In general, most of the demand for office space in Miami-Dade County has been in the urban core in areas like Brickell and Miami Beach. There’s been frenzied industrial development on the western edge of the county.

According to the third quarter report from Colliers, there was 4.9 million square feet of industrial under construction in Miami-Dade but there was also negative absorption of 281,172 square feet during the quarter. The industrial vacancy rate was 4.9%, up from 2.6% in the same period a year ago, but the average asking rent increased to $26.23 per square foot, from $25.20 per square foot.

Source: SFBJ