Lennar’s Miami HQ Changes Hands

5505 Waterford, currently anchored by Lennar. Image courtesy of CBRE

Franklin Street Properties has completed the $68 million sale of 5505 Waterford at Blue Lagoon, a 213,182-square-foot Class A office building in Miami’s Airport South submarket.

The property, the former headquarters of Burger King and current base of operations of Lennar, was sold to an undisclosed buyer in a transaction brokered by CBRE.

The brokerage team was led by Vice Chairman Christian Lee and Vice President Sean Kelly. Other members of the team included Senior Vice President Amy Julian, First Vice President Andrew Chilgren of the company’s Debt & Structured Finance Group, as well as Vice President Marcos Minaya, Senior Financial Analyst Tom Rappa and Financial Analysts James Carr and Matthew Lee.

From one headquarters to another

The sale is the property’s first change of hands in more than two decades. Franklin Street has owned the building since 2003, which CommercialEdge shows that it purchased for $48 million a year after its construction. Located at 5505 Blue Lagoon Drive, the recently sold property lies adjacent to the Waterford Business District, an embankment of Class A office buildings that lie along Waterford Drive in central Miami.

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Over the course of its ownership, Franklin Street oversaw renovations of the property’s lobby, lounge and parking structure, as well as the addition of a 5,000-square-foot fitness center, a fixture of many modern offices. Following Burger King’s 2018 move out of its headquarters to nearby 5707 Waterford at Blue Lagoon, publicly traded homebuilding giant Lennar became the property’s anchor tenant, signing a 16-year lease for roughly 156,000 square feet of space a year later. The building welcomed new tenants in 2022, with Unique Vacations, an event planning subsidiary of Sandals Resorts, closing on 53,119 square feet.

Deals and doings around Miami

Another fast food giant to recently make a home in Magic City is Subway, which opened a second headquarters at 1000 NW 57th Court in March of this year.

According to a November 2023 CommercialEdge report, Miami currently has among the South’s most valuable office markets, with a year-to-date sales price of $356 per square foot and an October listing rate of $44.83. The same data shows that office-specific investment sales from January through August added up to north of $1.3 billion.