MIAMI-A portfolio of four office buildings with a total of nearly 197,000 square feet, located in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties in South Florida, which are leased to the General Services Administration, were sold for $95.1 million on June 30th. The buyer was a newly-created fund formed for the purpose of acquiring and holding office buildings fully-occupied by the GSA called NGP Fund V LLC, based in McLean, Va.  The price per square foot for this portfolio was $483.

The buildings, which are LEED certified, were completed in 2008, and rented out to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, under 15-year leases. The properties are located in NW Miami-Dade County, where there is a 60,157 square foot building, the Kendall section of Miami-Dade County where there is a 45,911 square-foot-building and the city of Hialeah, which has a 41,064-square foot building. In Broward County near Ft. Lauderdale, in the city of Oakland Park,  there is an immigration services building with nearly 28,667 square feet.    

The developer of the buildings, the same entity which sold them, was Oakland Park-based South Florida Federal Partners, LLC, led by managing partner, Mark Levin. According to an April 2007 South Florida Business Journal article, the rental rate for the buildings was about $50 per square foot.

One of the reasons that the portfolio sold for a high price per square foot, says Hermen Rodriguez, HFF managing director in Coral Gables, who, along with director Ike Ojala, also of HFF in Coral Gables, represented the seller, was that two of the buildings have structured parking garages and the government demanded they be in certain zip codes. “Some of these buildings were in built-out neighborhoods, so finding developable land was expensive,” he says. Plus they are also LEED-certified, says Rodriguez. They also had to be served by public transportation and be near transportation arteries, according to government specifications.

“These buildings are the prototypes for all the immigration services buildings in the country,” says Rodriguez. The seller signed 15-year leases with the GSA, which started about a year ago, so there are 14 years left on them.

"Rarely do portfolios of this size and quality come to market in Miami-Dade County," says Rodriguez. Foreign buyers showed interest in them, he says. "There was a premium to buy these buildings as a portfolio," says Rodriguez.