(Save the date: RealShare Industrial 2012 comes to The Bankers Club, Miami, December 5 - 6.)

MIAMI—In South Florida’s largest multifamily sale of the year, The Residences at the Village at Merrick Park has traded for $52.25 million. The sales price translates to more than $400,000 per door.

Located at 4251 Salzedo Street next to the Village at Merrick Park, the asset has 120 upscale units. A pension fund advised by Heitman sold the multifamily asset to TIAA-CREFF. Jones Lang LaSalle represented the seller. JLL declined to comment on the deal.

“The majority of class A multifamily trades in Florida have been in the mid- to high-200s per unit,” Peter Mekras, a senior vice president at Continental Real Estate Companies, tells GlobeSt.com. “The reason the price is slightly subsidized is because the deal included in the income another master lease for the retail portion of the property. To extrapolate the allocation to residential, you probably have to take somewhere between $10 and $11 million off the top.”

The Village of Merrick Park is a high-end lifestyle center with about 743,000 square feet of retail and office space. Built in 2003, The Residences at the Village at Merrick Park is less than 15 minutes from the Miami International Airport, the Metrorail, the Metrobus, and the free trolley system. The asset is 96% occupied.

Mekras says the multifamily asset probably traded at a low- to mid-4 percent cap rate. He expects those institutional investors to continue paying cap rates in that range for class A multifamily as long as the Federal Reserve's fiscal policies keep interest rates down.

“This sale is probably one of the best examples of South Florida truly becoming a core market for multifamily,” Mekras says. “Traditionally in places like Boston and New York City and San Francisco, institutions in some instances will acquire smaller properties under the desired 250 units that they typically buy because of the limited opportunity to buy multifamily product. This is the first property an institution has bought of this scale in South Florida, so it says a lot.”