Cohen Brothers restarts 400K sf West Palm office tower

Charles Cohen’s Cohen Brothers Realty has restarted its long-stalled downtown West Palm Beach office tower, resuming permitting after a foreclosure lawsuit over the site was dismissed and the underlying loan changed hands.

The 400,000-square-foot project, known as West Palm Point at 850 South Quadrille Boulevard, is now planned at 25 stories, up from an earlier 23, with ground-floor retail and an 11-story parking garage topped by an amenity deck. Pelli Clarke & Partners is the architect.

Why it matters

The revival adds new office supply to a downtown West Palm Beach that has become one of the strongest office stories in the country, drawing finance and asset-management tenants relocating from the Northeast. Speculative office construction remains rare nationally, so a 400,000-square-foot tower advancing on the strength of that demand is notable. The restart also closes a distress chapter: the project had been tangled in a foreclosure suit tied to a $10 million loan, and clearing it lets one of New York’s veteran developers press ahead in a market where new trophy space is scarce.

The numbers

The dispute centered on a $10 million loan from Union Labor Life Insurance Company that matured in May; the lender’s foreclosure suit was dismissed in January by Judge Gregory Keyser, and the loan was reassigned last month to a lender managed by Farallon Capital Management. Leasing interest is already registering — roughly 15,950 square feet on the 15th floor is marked leased and 16,200 square feet on the 24th reserved, with letters of intent on several more floors.

What’s next

Cohen Brothers has restarted permitting and moves toward construction on a tower first revealed in 2020. Delivery would give downtown West Palm Beach another block of new development-grade office space, testing whether the market’s tenant migration can keep filling trophy towers as more supply comes online.