Bo Paty Inks Northbridge Centre Lease

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Navarro Lowrey Properties, Inc. recently announced that Nowlen, Holt & Miner, P.A. has leased 5,700 square feet of the 17th floor of Northbridge Centre.

Northbridge Centre is located at 515 North Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach.

The firm will be moving from its current offices at 215 Fifth Street in West Palm Beach to its new offices at Northbridge Centre upon completion of its tenant improvements expected the first quarter of 2012.

Mark C. “ Bo” Paty, Vice President of Navarro Lowrey Properties, represented the tenant and Kirk Fetter represented the owner in the transaction.

Formally organized in 1961, Nowlen, Holt & Miner, P.A. has become one of the larger Certified Public Accounting firms in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Las Vegas Sands Eyes Broward To Develop Casino Gambling Resort

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Las Vegas Sands has concluded that Broward County offers the right infrastructure to serve a casino and convention destination resort. The casino and convention center operator is equally interested in finding a site in Broward as much as it is looking in Miami-Dade County, according to Las Vegas Sands lobbyist Nick Iarossi.

Las Vegas Sands would need about 50 acres with easy access to main roads and highways and not necessarily on the waterfront, Iarossi said. He is a government consultant with Capital City Consulting in Tallahassee.

The Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International and Palm Beach International airports could easily serve out-of-state visitors who would attend large conventions at a future Las Vegas Sands resort destination. Iarossi made the remarks before members of the Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce, which hosted a casino forum today.

For either county, he said Las Vegas Sands envisions a resort that would include hotel rooms, a convention center, a performance hall, restaurants and retail space.

But he said the resort would not have enough rooms to serve a proposed convention center that would range in space between 500,000 square feet and 1 million square feet. Therefore, existing local hotels would benefit from an overflow of business from a Las Vegas Sands resort.

Iarossi said his client has yet to come up with a design for a casino destination. For now, Las Vegas Sands is waiting to see what happens with a bill to legalize casino gaming in Florida. The state Legislature plans to vote on the bill during its 2012 session starting in January.

Source:  DBR

Department of Revenue Pulls Tenant Improvement Tax

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The Florida Department of Revenue has decided to suspend its consideration of a sales tax on tenant improvements to commercial property.

For now, at least.

“We are not proceeding with the rule at this time,” DOR spokeswoman Renee Watters said Tuesday.

Commercial real estate brokers and development industry leaders opposed the tax, suggesting it had the potential to have a significant negative impact on the state’s economic comeback.

The Florida Gulfcoast Association of Realtors hosted a meeting of industry leaders and DOR officials in Tampa earlier this month.

Tenant improvements are any type of added or changed development to a real estate structure made to help a lessee conduct business. Industry officials were concerned that a tax would dampen tenants’ willingness to improve and expand their businesses, a key to Florida’s recovery.

Could the proposal return in the future? “That’s what ‘at this time’ generally means,” Watters said.

The state is facing a $2 billion budget shortfall in 2012.

Source: TBBJ

On The Move: Noel Steinfeld & Zach Wendelin Make Changes

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Jones Lang LaSalle recently announced that, effective November 1st, it has added top office broker, Noël Steinfeld, to its South Florida brokerage team.

Ms. Steinfeld will serve as Senior Vice President to the growing team and be based in Miami and join fellow Senior Vice President Glenn Gregory in the marketing and leasing of the firm’s newest Miami listing, 600,000-square-foot Brickell World Plaza, located at 600 Brickell Avenue.

Steinfeld brings 13 years of office landlord leasing experience to her new role at Jones Lang LaSalle. For the last six years, she served as First Vice President of Brokerage Services at CBRE, where in the last year alone she closed 30 transactions totalling nearly 300,000 square feet.

In addition to leasing Brickell World Plaza, Steinfeld will pursue additional landlord representation.

ComReal Fort Lauderdale also announced that it has brought Zach Wendelin on board as an Associate in its brokerage team.

Wendelin will be focused on landlord agency representation and tenant representation for clients in Broward County and Palm Beach County. He brings six years of market intelligence and experience in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.

Zach Wendelin joins ComReal after working at Jones Lang LaSalle, Cushman and Wakefield and Marcus & Millichap. Additionally, he was a Search and Rescue Swimmer in the U.S. Navy, serving overseas in Yokosuka , Japan .

He was awarded the 2008 “Rookie of the Year” and 2009 “Top Ten Broker” for Cushman & Wakefield in South Florida and has over one million square feet of leasing and sales experience.

Robert Listokin & Peyton Moore To Market 25,000-SF Bank-Owned Office Building

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Colliers International South Florida is pleased to announce that the firm has been appointed the exclusive agent to lease and sell a 25,000-square-foot bank owned office building located at 1180 SW 36th Avenue, Pompano Beach, FL. Executive Vice President Robert Listokin, SIOR, and Commercial Associate Peyton Moore, MBA, will market the available space in the building, ranging from 1,000 to 20,000 square feet.

“The property is ideal for an owner/user and an opportunity for a headquarter building,” says Listokin, especially because an entire floor consisting of 12,500 square feet is available. “Suites are already generically built out, are in very good condition and require minimal investment,” he adds. The building also features an access control entry system.

Tenants and buyers will be drawn to the building based on its lake views, an adjacent Publix and its prime location near the well-known Palm Aire Development, a residential golf community on the outskirts of the Cypress Creek market.

For more information on the listing, please contact Robert Listokin or Peyton Moore at 954.233.6000.

NY Congressional Defeat a Wake-Up Call for Obama, Democrats

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The victory by Republican Bob Turner over Democrat David Welprin in the special election to fill the seat vacated by Anthony Weiner in the New York 9th congressional district has Democrats feeling something close to panic.

Victories by the opposition party in special elections are often seen as harbingers of trouble to come for the party in power. When such a victory occurs in a bluest of blue districts such as New York 9th, that wake-up call should be considered deafening. When one considers that New York’s 9th was once held by Chuck Schumer, now an uberliberal Senator, and that it was last held by a Republican at the beginning of the Coolidge administration, that wake-up call should be seen as the equivalent of a nuclear blast.

The victory by Turner is being touted as being similar to the victory by Scott Brown in the race to fill the Senate seat in Massachusetts vacated when Teddy Kennedy died. It is much more than that. Turner, according to the Washington Post, ran as an anti Obama, deficit and tax cutting, tea party candidate. Turner won by about six points, a convincing win in a district regularly carried by Democrats by double digits.

Turner also attacked Obama’s Middle East policy, especially in regards to Israel. Dan Senor, writing for the Wall Street Journal, suggests that Turner’s win signals a collapse of support for Obama among Jewish Americans, irate at the hostile stance the Obama administration has taken toward Israel. This sentiment was oddly echoed by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who blames the prevalence of culturally conservative Orthodox Jews for Turner’s defeat of Obama.

The question now arises, how will the Obama administration and the Democrats respond to the thumping it has received in the New York race and a second special election in Nevada? Obama ignored the Scott Brown victory and went full steam ahead to ram through health care reform. The political tsunami of 2010 resulted in the lost of the House and an erosion of the Democratic majority in the Senate.
If the Democrats ignore what happened in New York and Nevada, perhaps hoping that a nominee like Rick Perry or Sarah Palin could be beaten by Obama, they may set themselves up for a defeat in 2012 of historic proportions, the equivalent of what happened to Jimmy Carter in 1980.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Source:  Yahoo! News