FORT LAUDERDALE, FL-PNC Bank took down more than 3,600 square feet at the Port Royale Financial Center, a five-story office building on Federal Highway. The ground-floor retail lease makes PNC bank the signature tenant.
Steve O’Hara, managing director at NAI/Merin Hunter Codman, together with Senior Commercial Associate Richard Brockney, negotiated the lease. NAI/Merin Hunter Codman is the exclusive leasing and management agent for Port Royale Financial Center.
“PNC beat out four other banks to win the location," O'Hara tells GlobeSt.com. “Bank branches in Florida can often take six to 12-months for approval to become fully operational, so that made the space real desirable for quite a number of banks."
The new lease represents PNC's seventh retail branch in Broward County. The location, which is surrounded by affluent residential communities and boasts drive-by traffic on US 1 estimated at over 40,000 vehicles daily, will include top-floor PNC signage on the building. O’Hara says PNC was the strongest credit quality and highest capitalized bank vying for the location.
The class A Port Royale Financial Center is in the heart of east Fort Lauderdale, a location that rounds out PNC’s other Broward locations, which include downtown Fort Lauderdale, Pompano Beach, Tamarac, Coral Springs, Coconut Creek and Parkland. The bank is expected to move in before the end of the year and make minor renovations that reflect U.S. Green Building Council standards.
The PNC lease is another good sign for Fort Lauderdale’s slowly recovering office market. The overall vacancy rate in third quarter of 2010 fell to the lowest rate reported in four quarters to 17.7%, according to Cushman & Wakefield. This rate will slowly decline further, the firm predicts, followed shortly by direct net asking rental rates returning to historical averages.
The overall asking rental rate at $26.20 per square foot marked the lowest rent reported since 2006. Now that the vacancy rate is trending down and fell for two consecutive quarters, Cushman & Wakefield expects landlords to begin asking higher rents for their properties as the amount of available space declines.
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