Miami Building Boom Spreads Into Downtown’s Tent City

[Scientific Playa]

money is still pouring into Miami

Miami Building Boom Spreads Into Downtown’s Tent City
By Nadja Brandt Oct 27, 2014 11:01 AM ET

Source: Miami Worldcenter Associates via Bloomberg
The $2 billion first phase of Worldcenter will include an 1,800-room Marriott Marquis hotel, shops and outdoor public... Read More

Source: Miami Worldcenter Associates via Bloomberg
The Worldcenter in Miami.

Photographer: Bill Faries/Bloomberg
Parking lots and low-rise buildings surround the Terremark building in downtown Miami.

Photographer: Bill Faries/Bloomberg
The AmericanAirlines Arena and the Metromover rail, top, adjacent to the future Worldcenter site.

Photographer: Bill Faries/Bloomberg
Miami's free Metromover rail line will link the Worldcenter project with the financial district.

Photographer: Bill Faries/Bloomberg
Miami's city core is dominated by empty parking lots. The neighborhood awaits a $2 billion face lift.

Photographer: Bill Faries/Bloomberg
High-rise condos on the border of the new Worldcenter site.

A building boom that transformed Miami into a destination for the global elite left out the city core, better known for its empty lots filled at night with tents for the homeless. Now the area awaits a $2 billion face lift.

Worldcenter, a 27-acre (11-hectare) development that languished for almost a decade, won city approval last month and is slated to break ground next year near Miami’s business district. The project will include almost 1,000 luxury condominiums and apartments, a Marriott Marquis hotel with convention space, and stores such as Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

Developers CIM Group, Falcone Group and Centurion Partners are seeking to breathe life into a neighborhood often referred to as the “hole in the doughnut,” an area of blight and weedy lots surrounded by luxury properties that are attracting South American, European and Asian buyers. Its revival reflects both the strong investor demand in Miami and a national trend toward a mix of real estate in an urban center catering to people who want to live, work and play in close proximity.

“It is the definition of slum and blight right at the doorsteps to some of the best areas in Miami,” said Marc Sarnoff, a City of Miami commissioner. “It’s a blank canvas. If you look at the transportation they are planning for this area, the new convention space plus the Worldcenter, these will be huge catalysts.”

Perez Museum
Bordered by the Miami River to the south and Biscayne Bay to the east, the area just north of old downtown saw little of the development that benefited Miami Beach and the financial center known as Brickell. With the $220 million Perez Art Museum Miami adjacent to the site and free public transport links to Brickell already running, Worldcenter builders are betting a neighborhood formerly known for the Camillus House homeless shelter can be transformed into a destination for local and foreign investors.

Miami ranked above Dubai, Paris and Beijing on a list of “cities that matter” to global high-net-worth investors, according to the 2014 “Wealth Report” by London-based consulting firm Knight Frank LLC. At No. 8, Miami was the only U.S. city on the list after New York, which ranked second.

“Miami is really turning into a true luxury market,” said Jay Phillip Parker, head of Douglas Elliman’s Florida brokerage. “The product that is coming to market is really catering toward a demographic that is high net worth, and now that’s starting to show all over downtown, too. This is the most activity I’ve ever seen there.”

Brickell Centre
The Worldcenter developers are expanding on downtown growth already seen in Brickell, to the south, where Hong Kong-based Swire Properties Inc. is building the $1.05 billion Brickell City Centre. The mixed-use development includes residential, luxury shopping, hotels and offices.

Brickell, the center of residential development when the real estate market crashed in 2008, has 3,146 condo units, according to a study by Integra Realty Resources for the Miami Downtown Development Authority. That compared with 352 units in the central business district, excluding those planned at the Worldcenter. There are 23,000 units in some stage of planning or development in the greater downtown area.

“There are an awful lot of projects,” said Matthew Whitman Lazenby, president and chief executive officer of Whitman Family Development, the retail equity investor with Swire at Brickell City Centre. “Some that may not come out of the ground. My view is that as long as every project has a point of view and filling its own niche it stands a good chance.”

Century’s Experience
Lazenby’s family has been in retail development in Miami Beach and Bal Harbour, north of the city, since 1912.

At One Thousand Museum, a condo tower planned just to the north of the Worldcenter site, units are selling at an average of $1,200 a square foot, a record for downtown, according to William P.D. Pierce, a Coldwell Banker broker based in Miami Beach. Demand for high-end residences in Miami’s downtown are in part led by investors priced out of even higher-cost markets, such as New York, he said. The area is also cheaper than ritzier areas such as South Beach.

“We have sold projects at $3,000 to $4,000 a foot, the highest-quality residential product at the beach on Collins Avenue, and I cannot tell you how many people tell me it’s still a bargain if you compare it to $8,000 to $9,000 a foot in markets like New York,” he said. “Now a lot of people are focusing on downtown. There is a lot of confidence in the long-term success of that area.”

‘Bit Concerning’
While condos are in demand, the “dramatic increase in retail is a bit concerning,” Parker said. Worldcenter will have to distinguish itself from other shopping enclaves in neighboring Brickell and the already existing Bal Harbour, Design Center and Village of Merrick Park, he said.

The idea for the 10-block Worldcenter project morphed from an original building-by-building plan into a master-planned concept in 2006 that took two years to gain approvals and then was stalled by the 2008 market crash and recession, according to Nitin Motwani, managing principal of Miami Worldcenter Associates, the project’s master developer.

Worldcenter Associates is a venture of Boca Raton, Florida-based Falcone and Centurion of Newport Beach, California. In 2011, the partners teamed up with Los Angeles-based CIM Group and worked on a new concept and permits under new zoning and building codes that control such aspects as density, Motwani said.

“We’ve taken a lot of time to bring in the right developers that specialize in these types of areas,” Motwani said. “The timing is also most important. We think that we are in a unique position with the transformation that has been going on in Miami.”

Convention Space
Worldcenter’s Marriott Marquis will feature about 1,800 rooms and 600,000 square feet (55,700 square meters) of meeting and convention space. It will also have an 80,000-square-foot outdoor event deck.

The success of a downtown business district that features residences, shops and offices could also be helped by demand from a younger local crowd that is looking to ditch their car in favor of walking or bicycling to and from work and during their personal time, according to Alyce Robertson, Executive Director of Miami’s Downtown Development Authority.

The two-square mile Development Authority area is home to 47,505 people with a median household income of $90,347 as of 2014, according to a Miami DDA report. Greater downtown’s population is projected to increase to 92,519 by 2016, according to the Miami DDA’s recently published 2014 Demographics Report. The median age for greater downtown Miami is 34.7 years old.

To cater to this cohort, the Worldcenter developers are planning to widen sidewalks; evaluating ways to incorporate Metromover, a free above-ground rail that offers Wi-Fi to passengers; and creating new links to public transit to reduce traffic, according to Motwani.

“People have been putting their toe in the water and are seeing you can live in the downtown core,” Robertson said. “It’s typically a younger demographic, between 20 and 40. Some of them are dropping cars in a car-centric Miami. That is a very big deal.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Nadja Brandt in Los Angeles at nbrandt@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Kara Wetzel at kwetzel@bloomberg.net; Rob Urban at robprag@bloomberg.net Bill Faries

 

[Scientific Playa]

a Miami-based luxury bus line leads the way back to the future.

Luxury buses scooping up more passengers

BY GLENN GARVIN
Masahiko Tsuzura listens to music in his seat on the Red Coach as he travels to Orlando, Oct. 23, 2014.CHARLES TRAINOR JR/MIAMI HERALD STAFF


Jill Pack popped her seat back, took a handful of potato chips out of her box of snacks, cast a languid gaze at Queen Latifah and Dolly Parton singing and dancing up on the TV screen, and pronounced her verdict: In all her years of traveling to see her relatives in Port St. Lucie, driving had never been like this before.

“I never thought I’d say this, but the bus is a really nice option,” she said.

Pack, a 46-year-old flight attendant from Chicago taking advantage of a South Florida layover to visit her family, is the latest convert to Miami-based RedCoach, a luxury bus service that’s on the cutting edge of what transportation experts say is a renaissance in bus travel.

“This is a new generation of bus service,” says Robert Poole, director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation think tank. “The growth in the past four to seven years has been phenomenal.”

Amanda Oliveiq 14, listens to music as she reclines in her seat on the Red Coach on the way to Orlando, Oct. 23, 2014. | CHARLES TRAINOR JR/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

› ‹

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Spurred on by passengers weary of the security hassles at airports in the post-9/11 world and anxious to stay wired to their cellphones and laptop computers while in transit, bus travel is growing four times as fast as airlines and nearly eight times as fast as railroads.

From cut-rate, nameless lines serving ethnic niches (known in the industry as “Chinatown buses” because that’s their most popular market) to streamlined commuter companies offering express service between cities on the upper East Coast, buses are taking back a big chunk of a travel market that they once dominated.

“The stigma that was long associated with bus travel has finally lifted, completely,” says Joseph Schwieterman, who studies transportation at DePaul Univeristy’s Chaddikk Institute for Metropolitan Development. “You’re seeing passengers riding buses now who would never have set foot in a Greyhound coach 20 years ago.”

Not so long ago, the industry’s dominant image was that of Dustin Hoffman as the seedy, tubercular pimp Ratso Rizzo, dying in the back of an overcrowded bus from New York to Miami at the end of Midnight Cowboy.

That’s a sharp contrast with RedCoach’s first-class buses, which feature roomy leather seats (just 27 in a coach built to hold 56) that recline into beds, on-board movies and free wi-fi service. “To get somebody out of a car, which offers so much freedom of scheduling, you have to give them a good reason, and I think we do,” RedCoach vice president Florencia Cirigliano says.

RedCoach, which stops at the Miami airport, has been in the luxury-bus business in Argentina for 20 years. It launched in Florida in 2010 after Cirigliano and her parents, vacationing in Miami, discovered that a side trip to Orlando would force them to either spend exorbitantly on airline tickets or rent a car and negotiate Florida’s unfamiliar and crowded freeways for several hours.

“We were surprised at how few options there were,” the 29-year-old Cirigliano says. “In Argentina, we have 40 million people and 20,000 buses. The business for buses is huge. Every town has a big bus station the size of Union Station in Washington, D.C. We didn’t see why that couldn’t work here.”

It wasn’t easy — many RedCoach buses in those early days carried just one or two passengers. (And even earlier this month, a Herald reporter traveling mid-week from Fort Pierce to Miami was the only one aboard.) “We lost a lot of money at first, a lot,” Cirigliano says.

But an aggressive combination of cut-rate fares (at one point, as little as $20 for a round trip between Miami and Orlando) and visits to county fairs and other events where crowds were invited to climb aboard and inspect the luxuriant seats expanded RedCoach’s business at a rapid pace.

Originally less than an asterisk in Florida’s transportation system, operating a single bus between Miami and Orlando, RedCoach now operates a fleet of 15 vehicles linking 11 Florida cities, from Naples to Jacksonville. Though the days of dirt-cheap fares are gone (a first-class round trip between Miami and Orlando now costs $80 to $100, about double the fare on conventional bus lines), the company expects to carry 100,000 passengers this year, a 35 percent increase from last.

Nearly half of RedCoach’s passengers are college students, traveling home on weekends from the big college campuses in Gainesville, Tallahassee and Orlando. Another quarter are businessmen. Those are the same two groups groups spurring the growth in bus travel around the rest of the country.

Both are attracted by the same thing: the opportunity for almost unlimited use of cellphones, computers and other electronic gadgets, which are restricted on airlines and often don’t work very well on trains because they often travel through remote areas far from phone towers. Even the most bare-bones bus these days is likely to have wi-fi service and power outlets.

“Bus travelers use technology much more intensively than those on trains and planes,” DePaul’s Schwieterman says. “The bus seat becomes an extension of their office. ... Time in a bus has suddenly become a billable hour.”

Polina Raygorodskaya started traveling by bus while commuting between Boston, where she was attending college, and New York, where she had founded a fashion-industry public relations company. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford other forms of travel, I was making money,” she says. “It was buses worked better with my schedule — I could always get a bus ticket at the last minute if something changed — and I wasn’t losing a day of work every time I traveled because I could get so much done on the bus.”

Her fondness for bus travel eventually turned into a business itself. Five years ago with a friend, she created the Boston-based wanderu.com, a one-stop shopping site that allows customers to collect schedules and prices from 28 different bus companies, then purchase tickets with a single click.

“We’re up to nearly a million searches a month,” the 28-year-old Raygorodskaya says, “and the vast majority of our customers are millennials. When you talk about an older generation of people who grew up with bus travel as it used to be, it’s not considered cool. This generation, which is what’s moving bus travel forward, thinks it’s really cool.”

Bus travel may never have been cool, exactly, but it was once the most popular long-distance travel option in America. “Between 1930 and 1965, you could go literally anywhere on a bus,” Schwieterman says. “Every little town in America had a bus stop.”

But the 1970s brought big changes in the way Americans traveled. Auto registrations doubled every year of the decade, while the 1978 deregulation of airlines sent plane fares plummeting. “By 1980, bus travel had acquired a real stigma,” Schwieterman says.

Most observers think the bus revival began in 2008 with the American arrival of the British company Megabus, which launched discount express service in the Midwest. (It has since expanded into California, the upper Northeast and, five months ago, Florida.) Megabus was soon followed by Boltbus, a competitor with similar service and routes, owned by Greyhound.

Around the same time, Greyhound — the only remaining national bus company in America, with 3,800 stops across the continental United States and Canada — began a major upgrade of its vehicles, adding legroom, wi-fi and electric sockets like the other companies.

“We’ve done a great deal to transform our brand, from new mobile websites to onboard amenities,” Greyhound spokeswoman Lanesha Gipson says. “We’ve improved an onboard experience that’s still safe, reliable and affordable.”

But instead of carving up ever-smaller pieces of the same passenger pie, all the new competitors have expanded the bus-service market. Precise numbers are hard to come by because no federal agency collects statistics on bus travel, but Schwieterman estimates interstate buses carry about 70 million passengers a year.

“That’s way fewer than the airlines, but way more than the trains,” he says. “It’s a force to be reckoned with.”

RedCoach’s traffic doesn’t count toward that total, because none of its routes stretch across Florida’s borders — yet. “We want to add a few more cities within the state, but for sure we plan to go outside Florida,” Cirigliano says. “The business has expanded much faster than we expected.”

So fast, in fact, that it triggered a domestic crisis. Her parents liked their 2010 visit to Florida so much that they bought a vacation condo here. Cirigliano used it when she came for the RedCoach launch, expecting to stay a few weeks. Four years later, she’s still there, along with a husband and, any day now, a baby.

“My mother was furious,” she recalls. “She told my father, ‘You promised me a condo for vacations, not to move my daughter out of the country.’ But so far, they’re still married.”

 

[Scott Larock]

They're getting rid of the poor, right by the heat stadium is a massive hood with poor black folks, give it 5 years and it'll be completely changed.

Miami is changing it's rep and wants to attract the rich and upscale instead of the poor.

I need to GTFO quick lord help me.

Where's dree954? How do you tag a nikka?

 

[Scientific Playa]

Greater Downtown Miami looks like a buyer’s market for condos
BY PETER ZALEWSKI

Special to the Miami Herald

10/05/2014 3:00 PM

Peter Zalewski

• Story
• Comments

Do not look now, but a buyer’s market for condominium units is reemerging in Greater Downtown Miami just in time for the winter buying season that begins in November.

Five years since the Greater Downtown Miami condo market hit bottom in 2009, the nearly 60-block stretch from the Julia Tuttle Causeway south to the Rickenbacker Causeway, and Biscayne Bay west to Interstate 95, is once again showing signs of buyers gaining a statistical upper hand over sellers.

Greater downtown Miami now has almost 14 months of condo resale inventory available for purchase at an average asking price of nearly $490 per square foot as of Sept. 30, according to the latest data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange.

During the first nine months of this year, buyers acquired fewer than 1,450 condos — about 160 units a month — at an average sales price of $405 per square foot, according to the preliminary data for September.

By comparison, buyers acquired an average of almost 200 condos monthly at an average price of less than $370 per square foot in Greater Downtown Miami during the same January-through-September period of 2013, according to the data.

As a general rule, industry-watchers say a healthy real estate market has about six months of residential inventory available for purchase at any time. Fewer months of residential real estate inventory typically suggest a seller’s market and more months indicate a buyer’s market.

In addition to the increasing supply of resale units available in Greater Downtown Miami, developers have proposed at least 64 new condo towers with almost 18,500 units in this market, according to the pre-construction condo market website CraneSpotters.com. (Full disclosure: My firm operates the website.)

Some 31 condo towers with a total of more than 9,100 units are being marketed for presale — quite likely to the detriment of resales — at a mean minimum price of nearly $535 per square foot in Greater Downtown Miami, according to the latest Developers Price Survey conducted in September by CraneSpotters.com.The combination of proposed and existing condos available in Greater Downtown Miami means buyers have plenty of options to choose from when considering a purchase.

This current scenario raises various scenarios about the state of the Greater Downtown Miami market, ranging from an area that is showing signs of inventory saturation to proactive sellers listing their units today in preparation for the winter buying season.

Whatever the answer, market participants are unlikely to have a clear understanding of the current condo climate until the summer of 2015, when the next wet season begins.

In the meantime, buyers and sellers are expected to work diligently in the months ahead in pursuit of a competitive advantage in the Greater Downtown Miami condo market by focusing their efforts on sub-markets that are better-positioned than others.

A closer look at the statistics reveals the Biscayne Boulevard Corridor sub-market — which stretches from the MacArthur Causeway north to the Julia Tuttle Causeway — has the fewest months of resale inventory available: 11.4 months.

Currently, fewer than 475 condos are on the resale market in the Biscayne Boulevard Corridor at an average asking price of about $429 per square foot, according to the data.

During the first nine months of this year, buyers acquired about 41 units monthly at an average price of $365 per square foot in this sub-market.

A notable challenge for the area is the fact that the average transaction price for a condo resale is about 7 percent higher in 2014 than at the peak of the last boom in 2006, when prices averaged $340 per square foot.

The next-best sub-market is the Brickell Avenue area — which stretches from the Rickenbacker Causeway north to the Miami River — where there is about 13.7 months of resale supply.

More than 1,100 condo resales are currently available at an average asking price of $510 per square foot in that area.

For context, the average resale transaction price in the Brickell Avenue area during the first nine months of 2014 is about 5 percent less than the 2006 peak of $443 per square foot.

Based on available inventory, the worst-positioned sub-market is the Central Business District — which stretches from the Miami River north to the MacArthur Causeway — where more than 15 months of condo resale inventory is on the market. Almost 600 condo resales are available at an average asking price of more than $490 per square foot.

Fortunately for this sub-market, the average condo transaction price in the Central Business District in 2014 is still about 2 percent below the price level of $419 per square foot achieved at the peak of the last boom in 2006.

The unanswered question going forward is whether sellers are studiously preparing for the historically busy winter tourism season or simply trying to unload their units to the highest bidder in the months ahead.

Peter Zalewski is a principal with the Miami real estate consultancy Condo Vultures. Zalewski, a licensed Florida real estate professional since 1995 and founder of CVR Realty and Condo Vultures Realty LLC, advises developers, lenders and institutional investors. Zalewski also runs the pre-construction condo project website CraneSpotters.com in conjunction with the Miami Association of Realtors.

Greater Downtown Miami condo resale market

This is an annual breakdown of condo resales in the GDM and its three sub-markets since the peak of the last market in 2006. These figures reflect January to September of each year shown. Please note that all these statistics are for condo resale activity between the Julia Tuttle Causeway and the Rickenbacker Causeway, and Biscayne Bay west to I-95.

Greater Downtown Miami

(Julia Tuttle Causeway South to the Rickenbacker Causeway)


Source: CraneSpotters compiled this chart using data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange as of Sept. 30


Paraiso Bay Miami and ONE Paraiso
Paraiso Bay Preconstruction Condos
Paraiso Bay Miami is located at 600 NE 31 St. Miami, Florida 33137

http://www.paraisobay-miami.com/

 

[Type Username Here]

They are dropping serious money down here in South Florida with construction and developments. Especially in Miami.

It's crazy to watch.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Pre-construction Miami, Florida
Below is a mix of pre construction and new buildings that are ready for immediate occupancy

For specific information on these projects call our sales team at 305-726-4312
Pre-Construction in Miami

Canvas Miami Hyde Midtown Miami The Edge on Brickell
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Miami's Art and Entertainment District) (Midtown Miami) (Brickell)

Park Grove Muse Brickell City Centre
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Coconut Grove) (Sunny Isles Beach) (Brickell)

Brickell Flat Iron Residences Armani Casa SLS Lux in Brickell
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Brickell) (Sunny Isles Beach) (Brickell)

ONE Paraiso Aria on the Bay Ion East Edgewater
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Edgewater) (Edgewater) (Edgewater - Miami Design Distrcit)

Jade Signature Oceana Bal Harbour

 

[Scott Larock]

So what about the poor and lower income folks? Death

looks like a plan to get rid of the poor, lots of poor people living in Miami.

 

[Scientific Playa]

Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Sunny Isles Beach) (Bal Harbour)

Brickell Heights Paraiso Bay Biscayne Beach
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Brickell) (Edgewater) (Edgewater)

Nine at Mary Brickell Village Hyde Hollywood Beach 1010 Brickell
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Brickell) (Hollywood Beach) (Hallandalel)

Echo Aventura Echo Brickell Costa Hollywood
Pre-Construction Pre-Construction Pre-Construction
(Aventura) (Brickell) (Hollywood Beach)

Porsche Design Tower The Mansions at Acqualina Chateau Beach



Brickell City Centre Pre Construction Sales 305-726-4312


Brickell City Centre Pre Construction Sales 305-726-4312

 

[ADevilYouKhow]

Isn't it going to be under water of 20 years? I guess they didn't learn from the last crash. too much funny money and fickle buyers.

 

[newworldafro]

crazy development...how much land do they have in this city..damn...

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=533494&page=34

 

[Scientific Playa]

Isn't it going to be under water of 20 years? I guess they didn't learn from the last crash. too much funny money and fical buyers.

local rumor has it, it's a global money washing scheme happening. who knows where the assets will be moved in the future before the atlantic ocean does her thing.

 

[Type Username Here]

So what about the poor and lower income folks? Death

looks like a plan to get rid of the poor, lots of poor people living in Miami.

That's an understatement. Miami is the third poorest city in the country.

 

[Scott Larock]

Let mw guess,

The plan is to push the poor into areas where they're not seen for example the surburbs and places like that, small towns with that fegurson persence and keep them trapped in that system, leave the nice areas for the rich who have the money and can fund the city while the poor deals with blunt racism from the small towns where voting takes places on different dates.

 

[Scott Larock]

That's an understatement. Miami is the third poorest city in the country.

So did I guess right

 

[Scientific Playa]

That's an understatement. Miami is the third poorest city in the country.

city of miami yes, but not miami dade county.