WareSpace Pays $20.42M for Miami Gardens Flex Warehouse Site
The Miami Gardens buy is one leg of a $36.5 million, two-market push that also gave WareSpace its first Bay Area property.
WareSpace has bought a roughly 100,000 square foot industrial building at 4900 NW 167th Street in Miami Gardens for $20.42 million and plans to carve it into more than 125 small-bay flex warehouse units, the company said Thursday. The purchase is one half of a $36.5 million, two-market push that also marks WareSpace’s entry into the Bay Area, with a 64,103 square foot building in South San Francisco.
Why it matters
Small-bay industrial space, the kind a local contractor, distributor or service business can actually lease in units of a few hundred to a couple thousand square feet, has been shrinking as older buildings get torn down or reflagged as big-box logistics. WareSpace’s bet is the opposite of that trend: buy an existing building and subdivide it smaller, not bigger. The Miami Gardens site sits on the Palmetto Expressway with direct access to I-95, about 18 minutes from WareSpace’s existing Medley property and 35 minutes from its Fort Lauderdale location, making it the company’s third South Florida asset. For developers watching where warehouse conversions are headed next, this is a signal that subdividing existing SoFla industrial stock for small tenants is becoming its own acquisition thesis, not just a byproduct of larger redevelopment plays.
The numbers
The Miami Gardens building cost $20.42 million, or roughly $204 per square foot on its existing 100,000 square feet, and is slated for 125-plus units. The South San Francisco building, at 161 Starlite Street, cost $16.05 million for 64,103 square feet and will yield 85-plus units, WareSpace’s first Bay Area property. Combined, the two deals total $36.5 million across about 164,000 square feet. WareSpace now holds 34 facilities totaling more than 3.2 million square feet nationwide. Both markets are population dense and high barrier, WareSpace co-founder and chief operating officer Joseph Ely said, and “appropriately sized options are increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to find.”
What’s next
WareSpace did not disclose a construction timeline or the seller on either deal. Watch for permitting activity on the Miami Gardens parcel as the company moves from acquisition to subdivision, and for whether the Bay Area entry becomes a beachhead for further West Coast small-bay buys. More in the South Florida market.