New construction is occurring along Brickell Avenue where the 500,000-sf Barclays Financial Centre is due for delivery this November. The asset is already more than half preleased—including the recent signing by Wall Street's Morgan Stanley Dean Witter for 48,000 sf.

The Airport/West Dade, Coral Gables and Miami Beach submarkets are even hotter, though new construction in the suburbs softened the vacancy-rate decline there from 13.4% to 11.2% over the last year.

Miami-Dade County's mid-2000 office vacancy rate was 11.3%, down 2.6 percentage points during the previous 12 months and the lowest in more than a decade. The average asking rent for class A CBD space is now up to $30.48 psf. Non-CBD space averages $24.71 psf. Countywide (the CBD plus the suburbs), the average class A rental was $27.05 psf at this year's midpoint.