South Florida retail vacancy holds below 5% as rents climb

South Florida retail is running historically tight: Colliers puts second-quarter vacancy at 3 percent in Miami-Dade and below 5 percent across all three counties. For retail developers and grocery-anchored investors, the scarcity is the whole thesis, and it is why new product still pencils here when it stalls elsewhere.

Why it matters

Sub-5 percent vacancy across a major metro is a green light for ground-up retail, because it means tenants have nowhere to go and landlords hold pricing power. With almost no slack, a well-located center leases before it opens and holds rent through the cycle. That flips the calculus for developers who have spent two years wary of retail: in South Florida the constraint is supply, not demand. The tightness also reflects the region’s broader in-migration story. South Florida asking rents are up 1.0 percent year over year to about $2,693 a month even as home values dipped, per our market data, the same population pull that keeps storefronts full.

The numbers

Colliers reports Miami-Dade vacancy at 3 percent with asking rents of $42.50 per square foot, up 2.6 percent from the first quarter. Broward sits at 4.3 percent and $27.67, and Palm Beach at 4 percent and $30.14, up 3.4 percent annually. Miami-Dade logged 378,795 square feet of net absorption in the quarter and has about 1.3 million square feet under construction. Broward ran a negative 102,436 square feet of absorption, the one soft spot.

What’s next

With just 1.3 million square feet building in Miami-Dade against near-zero vacancy, expect rents to keep climbing and developers to chase entitlements for grocery-anchored and neighborhood retail across South Florida. Broward’s negative absorption is the number to watch: a second soft quarter would signal the tightening is uneven, but for now the region remains one of the country’s strongest retail development cases.