Genting Offers Miami Waterfront Site for $1B

Genting Malaysia Bhd is offering a prime 16-acre waterfront site in on Biscayne Bay in Miami for $1B after abandoning plans to develop a casino there.

The Downtown Miami waterfront parcel was one home to the Miami Herald newspaper. According to Avison Young, which is marketing the property, the site can accommodate up to 20M SF of mixed-use development and comes with a series of entitlements from the city.

The site at 1431 North Bayshore Dr. is one of the largest undeveloped parcels on the waterfront, offering 800 feet of frontage on Biscayne Bay.

The Malaysian gaming giant bought most of the parcel in 2011 for $236M and assumed a mortgage for the rest of it, including the Omni Center building a few months later.

Genting’s original plans for the site include a hotel-casino, and several retail and residential buildings. The firm attempted several times to obtain a casino license but could not get state officials to grant it an exemption from a Florida law that gives Native American tribes the exclusive right to operate casinos in the Sunshine State.

Miami’s urban core, including Edgewater, Wynwood, the Arts & Entertainment District, downtown and Brickell, has recorded over $1 billion in land sales over the past two years, according to Real Capital Analytics data provided by Colliers International South Florida

Earlier this year, GlobeSt. reported that developers are targeting hundreds of aging condo apartment buildings in Miami Beach for acquisition so they can tear them down and build new luxury residential towers, zeroing in on towers approaching a 40-year deadline to recertify structural integrity.

At least eight waterfront condo buildings in Miami Beach currently are involved in discussions for sale to developers, according to brokers and developers surveyed this week by the Wall Street Journal. WSJ said developers including Related Group and Starwood Capital Group are pursuing aging waterfront properties in the Miami area.

Florida law requires that 80 percent of condo unit owners agree to a sale before a condo building can change hands, often forcing developers to go through a tedious process known as condo termination, effectively negotiating the purchase of each unit with its owner.

The requirement in South Florida that buildings older than 40 years must be recertified for structural integrity is creating a reckoning of sorts for the existing inventory of beachfront apartment buildings in the area, a majority of which date back to the 1970s or earlier.

The viability of older apartment towers in the Miami area has come into question in the wake of the partial collapse of a 12-story beachfront condo building in nearby Surfside that killed 98 people.