Carnival Lists 470K SF Miami HQ for Sale

Carnival Corp. is aiming to cash in on the headquarters building it has occupied for the past 30 years on the outer limits of Miami.

The cruise giant has listed its 470K SF HQ building in Doral for sale, tapping Cushman & Wakefield. When the property last traded, it was acquired in 1983 for slightly less than $17M.

Carnival is planning to occupy the Doral building for the next two years, then downsize to about 300K SF of new office space in the Miami area, according to a report in Bloomberg.

The sale of the Doral property will allow Carnival to cash in on decades of real estate growth in Doral, which in addition to a famous golf course has seen a condo boom and skyrocketing property values in the past 30 years.

It also will enable the company to get closer to its boats. Doral’s current headquarters is 15 miles from the port of Miami; the HQ building is in proximity to gridlocked highways. The primary challenge to Carnival is moving from one hot real estate market to another.

The cruise industry is in the midst of a boom in which Carnival—one of the world’s largest cruise lines with 120K employees—has seen bookings bounce back to record levels as tourism recovers.

Carnival’s competitors are already jockeying for space in and around the port of Miami.

Royal Caribbean Cruises, which is based inside the port, broke ground this year on a new 10-story headquarters building in proximity to the port. MSC Cruises SA, in the midst of building a new cruise terminal at the port, is planning to move its U.S. headquarters to a downtown Miami office building near the port, the report said.

The cruise industry had a record year in 2023, and the outlook for 2024 is that another record will be set.

The trade group Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) calculates that 31.5M people booked trips last year on its members’ ships, which encompass about 90% of the industry—a 6% increase from the pre-pandemic peak in 2019.

The only holding back the cruise industry from larger increases is the supply of ships, which did not increase much coming out of the pandemic because older ships were retired and new deliveries slowed.

CLIA forecasts that 35.7M travelers will sail on its member lines’ cruises in 2024, an increase of more than 13%. Some lines already are experiencing minimal availability for cruises in the first half of 2024, the trade group reported; a few lines already are accepting reservations for cruises scheduled for Q3 and Q4 in 2026.