Investors keep flocking to the Miami suburb of West Kendall.
Property records show an entity tied to NAI Miami just paid $41.8 million for a large development site near West Kendall Baptist Hospital.
West Kendall Holdings, a subsidiary of the Howard Hughes Corporation, sold the nearly 70-acre parcel at the southeast corner of Southwest 88th Street and Southwest 162nd Avenue for about $14 per square foot. Previous transaction information was not available in property records.
“[Howard Hughes] does a lot of other developments, and I think this project just got stale on their shelf,” NAI Miami principal Robert Eckstein said. The firm, which is also part of the site’s ownership, represented a group of investors in the purchase.
Plans for the parcel are to be determined, Eckstein said, adding that the owners intend to ask local community members what they want to see built on the site before beginning construction. “We had someone say they would love to see a Whole Foods,” Eckstein said.
Development of a larger mixed-use project at the site, previously called Kendall Town Center, has been stagnant. The first phase of the project, being delivered by multiple developers, was the West Kendall Baptist Hospital that opened in 2011. More than half a decade later, Gertz Builders and Developers Inc. scored a construction loan for an adjacent 53,185-square-foot retail development called The Pointe at Kendall Town Center.
Records show NAI Miami financed the deal with a $24.9 million loan from City National Bank of Florida.
The West Kendall suburban area has recently been experiencing additional development and activity. In September, CVS Pharmacy bought a nearby office building for $7.5 million with plans to construct a new store and a BB&T Bank. Last month, an entity of Blackstone Group’s real estate investment trust bought an apartment complex in southwest Miami-Dade for about $139 million.