A familiar face made a big move last week with the $140 million purchase of 11 storefronts on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.
Michael Comras’ Comras Company plans to redevelop the properties into a 150,000-square-foot boutique shopping district called NoLi — short for North Lincoln Road.
In 2015, the retail developer and broker sold 1001-1035 Lincoln Road for $370 million. The buyer was Pontegadea, the family office of Spanish billionaire Amancio Ortega.
Now Comras is back in a big way. He has scooped up nearly a dozen storefronts, mostly along the 700 and 800 blocks of Lincoln Road. Current tenants include The Cheesecake Factory, Salt & Straw, It’Sugar and Lincoln Eatery on Lincoln Lane. Comras is designing NoLi as a pedestrian retail experience, lined with boutique storefronts and cafes with outdoor seating and centered around a fountain and landscaping.
His investment is another sign of the next era for Lincoln Road. Record rents ($150 to $300 per square foot) set years ago resulted in record vacancies, and a number of storefronts sit empty. National tenants have moved onto competing neighborhoods like the Miami Design District and Wynwood. Even the movie theater shuttered.
As investor and developer Scott Sherman put it in an interview last month, “the street lost its energy.”
But landlords and brokers suggest that the doom-and-gloom narrative will soon be in the past.
Sherman returned to the street last year after nearly a decade, and paid $10.4 million for a property that’s leased to the clothing store AllSaints. Now that rents have come down, “the street’s affordable enough for creative operators to come back,” he said.
Broker Stephen DeMeo agreed about the need for creativity. The street, she said, “needs activation — pop-up stores, rooftop events, wellness studios [and] cultural tie-ins.”
Katherine Kallergis, TheRealDeal
Read more here: therealdeal.com
