MG3 Group bought a development site in Aventura in a bet on the city’s growth as an office market.
MG3 paid $10 million for the assemblage at 21001 Biscayne Boulevard near Aventura Hospital, according to records and real estate database Vizzda. The firm plans to include medical office space in its project.
The deal, which breaks down to $9.5 million per acre, comes as Miami experiences a cooling of development site prices.
Selling entity Jewish Outreach Center is tied to the Aventura Chabad based in the building immediately east of the purchased site. It had paid $781,800 for the land and other lots in 2019, records show.
The purchase marks continued investment for MG3 across asset classes. The firm owns the retail space at the nearby Aventura Parksquare mixed-use development. MG3 bought the 50,000 square feet of commercial space in 2021 for $48 million, marking one of South Florida’s biggest retail deals that year.
In November, the Aventura-based firm’s real estate investment trust dropped $78 million for the 98-acre Walgreens Distribution Center at 15998 Walgreens Drive west of Jupiter. In the sale-leaseback deal, Walgreens sold the industrial property but will continue to occupy the facility.
Marcelo Saiegh, Gustavo Bogomolni and Hernan Leonoff lead MG3. The firm also has had a strong focus on charter schools. It sold eight campuses throughout Florida in 2021 for a combined $242 million, including a school in Homestead and another in Hollywood.
MG3 joins other real estate players targeting Aventura, partly based on the demand expected from the recently opened Brightline station at 19796 West Dixie Highway in the Ojus neighborhood that is just outside Aventura.
13th Floor Investments, led by Arnaud Karsenti, wants to build an up to 350-unit apartment building at 19680-19770 West Dixie Highway, or one lot south of the Brightline stop.
Starting in late 2020, South Florida land prices soared amid an influx of population and businesses that supercharged the tri-county region’s market. But the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes put the kibosh on rising prices. In Miami’s urban core, the price per acre dropped to $19.3 million in the fourth quarter, a 65 percent decline from the second quarter.