Publix Super Markets will get $3.6 million in taxpayer money from the state and city to build a distribution center in south Orlando that is expected to employ 156 people.

The $188.5 million facility for frozen food and produce will pay an average salary of $46,325, officials said Monday. Publix said it will open in 2015. Another Publix distribution center on Sand Lake Road will remain open as well.

Orlando is providing impact fee credits worth an estimated $1.5 million and up to $390,000 in property-tax rebates. The city and state together are giving another $390,000 through a program designed to encourage development on land that is contaminated or has the appearance of being polluted.

Orlando received a $1.1 million state grant for an extension of Hazeltine National Drive that will allow Publix access to the site. Publix also is eligible for state training benefits worth almost $285,000.

Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer said Publix’s choice of Orlando for the distribution center sends a message to other companies that “we’re a good place to do businesses

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Howard Lutnick, the hard-charging head of Cantor Fitzgerald, wasn’t kidding when he said he was going to make a big splash in the commercial real estate business. Less than one year after BGC Partners Inc., a Cantor Fitzgerald spinoff, acquired Newmark Knight Frank, it is buying Grubb & Ellis Co., the 43-year old real-estate services firm that at one point was one of the largest in the country.
Mr. Lutnick said on a BGC earnings call Friday that the move to buy Grubb could triple the size of BGC’s real-estate brokerage team, from about 425 brokers when it acquired Newmark Knight Frank last fall to more than 1,200 brokers.

But will that be big enough? Analysts for months have warned that the mid-sized real estate companies are in the most precarious positions, vulnerable to losing business to small boutique firms as well as the market giants. The merged Newmark-Grubb firm will certainly fall in the middle position. The combined annual revenue of the two is in the $755 million range, based on recent securities filings by Grubb and BGC, on behalf of Newmark. That would make the new firm about a tenth the size of CBRE Group Inc., the world’s largest firm which reported $5.9 billion in annual revenue in 2011.
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Tourism in Florida roared to a record in 2011 with an estimated 86 million visitors traveling to the Sunshine State, a sign that the extended tourist lull from the Great Recession, hurricanes and the BP oil spill may be receding.

The visitor count was up 4.4 percent from 2010, and topped a previous record set in the rosier economic environment of 2007, according to figures released Thursday by Visit Florida, the state’s tourism promotion agency.

But if current conditions hold, that top mark could be short-lived, especially as measured by Southwest Florida’s experience so far in 2012.

Local tourism officials say this winter tourism season is off to a solid start, thanks largely to warmer January temperatures compared with the extended cold snaps of the previous two years.

“Bookings are really strong, so we think the season is coming in much greater than anticipated,” said Virginia Haley, president of the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau.

As tenants are growing restless and struggling with the economic downturn, many business owners are reading the fine print of their leases to see if they’re overpaying for everything from window cleaning to electricity.
Rent escalation clauses, which provide for increases in rent each year to help account for inflation, have proven a particularly contentious subject.
Take a recent dispute between the El Rio Grande restaurant and its landlord, Murray Hill Mews Owners Corp., over the rent for the retail space at the base of a large apartment tower at 160 E. 38th St. The discrepancy centers essentially on how the rent escalation is calculated.
The method used would make a big difference in rent especially in the later years of the lease. Based on the landlord’s preferred formula, the annual rent would be about $5 million by 2018, according to court papers filed by El Rio Grande.
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Good news, mom and dad: Your adult kids, who moved back home during the recession, finally are moving out again.

As the economy recovers, more people are getting jobs, getting out on their own and returning to the Sunshine State — and that’s having a positive ripple effect in the local real estate market.

Demand is growing for houses and apartments, leading to growth for real estate brokers, mortgage brokers and apartment developers.

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Monday, February 13th, 2012

It’s official: Orlando’s tourism industry has emerged from the recession stronger than ever.

Orange County collected more than $177 million in resort taxes in 2011 — the highest level in the past five years, and up 15 percent from $153.3 million in 2010.

The second-highest resort tax collection in that time period was $165.8 million collected in 2007 — the last year before the economic downturn.

The Orange County resort tax is collected on sales from hotel room stays and is used to fund projects such as building the Amway Center and to fund Central Florida tourism marketing campaigns.

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Office-building construction is in the midst of a severe drought. This means higher rents may be on the horizon in some cities, if history is any guide.

In the U.S. last year, developers broke ground on office buildings with a total of just 56 million square feet of space, the lowest level tracked by McGraw-Hill Construction since at least 1960.

Even during the early 1990s, in the aftermath of a surge of construction a decade earlier that left cities around the country dotted with empty office buildings, the U.S. never dropped below 80 million square feet of new office-building construction a year, according to McGraw-Hill. And analysts don’t expect construction to pick up anytime soon.

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TALLAHASSEE An influential state House committee unveiled plans Wednesday for more than $125 million a year worth of new business-tax breaks, ranging from broad cuts sought by Republican Gov. Rick Scott to narrower ones for everyone from manufacturers to private-airplane owners and oil-drilling concerns.

The assortment of breaks easily cleared the Republican-controlled House Finance and Tax Committee with only minimal opposition from some Democratic lawmakers and lobbyists for cities and counties.

The centerpiece is a multipronged “economic development” package (PCB 12-07) that includes two of Scott’s top legislative priorities this spring.

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The dollar volume of commercial real estate sales vaulted back to longterm historical levels in 2011. CoStar Group has confirmed $291.6 billion in CRE sales in 2011, a 32% increase over the sales volume in 2010.

Last year’s volume bested the 12-year average volume of $254.2 billion. However, the 2011 dollar volume is still overshadowed by credit-bubble level of $560.5 billion in 2007.

Sales of office property led all other types in dollar volume totaling almost $74 billion. That volume was 39% higher than 2010, but it was only one-third the volume of office sales in 2007

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Though Florida was hard hit by the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, and unemployment in the state sits 1.5 percent above the national average at 10.1 percent, in the first quarter of 2012, employers in two of Florida’s metropolitan areas are planning to increase their workforces at a rate that outpaces every other metro area in the country, according to employment services firm Manpower Group’s latest employment outlook survey, released earlier this month. In Cape Coral-Fort Myers, and in Lakeland-Winter Haven, a net 17 percent of employers plan to add employees in the first quarter of next year. Two other Florida metro areas, Bradenton-Sarasota-Venice and Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, make it into Manpower’s top 15, both with a 12 percent net hiring outlook

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