MIAMI-Barclays has signed a 10-Year, 24,000-square-foot lease worth $9 million at the Mellon Financial Center on Brickell Avenue, home to Miami’s financial district. The global financial-services firm's lease negotiations, which took almost a year, were complicated by the twists and turns of the financial crisis. Barclays is a long-standing tenant at the class A office assset.

Although Barclays’ Latin American regional office had been in the building since 2000, when it first opened, and, in fact, had been the lead tenant in what was then the Barclays Financial Center, the company had been on another floor. It wanted to keep one floor, but surrender another, which it was subleasing to two other firms.

Today, Barclays, which took over Lehman Brothers’ Latin American regional office in Miami after Lehman’s demise in September of 2008, occupies the same space on the 12^th floor, as did the once formidable New York-based financial services company. But it gave back nearly 25,000 square feet on the 28th floor, says Jack Lowell, Flagler Real Estate Services vice president, who, along with Adriana Jimenez, the building’s leasing director, negotiated the transaction. That space had been sublet to Guggenheim Partners, LLC, and BDO Seidman, LLP, a couple of years ago, which are now direct tenants of the landlord,  Testa Inmuebles en Renta S.A., he says.

Today, Guggenheim, which occupies 11,451 square feet, has its own 10-year lease. But Lowell says  that he is still negotiating a permanent lease with BDO Seidman.

The Mellon Financial Center is 99% leased, although Lowell says that he is negotiating with some tenants for renewals. Still, this leasing rate looks pretty good, especially considering that the overall vacancy rate for Brickell Avenue and downtown is 20% for all classes of space, says Lowell. “But vacancies are spread very unevenly,” he says. In fact, approximately 1.3 million square feet have been completed on Brickell Avenue and in the adjacent downtown sub-market so far this year, much of which is not leased.

Currently,  Lowell says that he is negotiating for over 125,000 square feet at the Mellon Financial Center which has 522,000 square feet altogether. He declined to say what the asking rents were at the building, except to say that “they are competitive.”

Leasing negotiations can be complicated, says Lowell, and tenants can sometimes be hard to budge. They are comfortable if they still have a year on their lease, “but when they come within six months of a lease ending, they realize that they had better cut a deal, because it takes time to do a build out,” he says.

Barclays is based in London and the home office had to approve the company’s lease because it is a large transaction, says Lowell. But Barclays is not the only tenant whose negotiations are complicated, he says. Negotiating with Guggenheim was also not easy, “and everyone has his or her own sets of attorneys and brokers,” which adds to the complexity, says Lowell.