When a $22MM retail loan on Lincoln Road came under servicer pressure, the answer was not a Miami lender or a Los Angeles lender. It was the right lender, a credit union whose underwriting read the asset the way it deserved, sourced by a desk that runs the national capital markets rather than a local rate sheet. That closing anchors our South Florida practice, and it explains how we work here.
What we finance in South Florida
Retail is the anchor of our Florida book. Lincoln Road, Collins Avenue, the neighborhood centers west of the beach: high-street and strip retail in this market draws national lender attention, and our $22MM Lincoln Road refinance, including a $4.5MM cash out on a ten-year fixed structure, shows what a properly run process produces even when the story is complicated.
Multifamily demand here is deep and getting deeper. Fort Lauderdale, North Miami, and the corridor markets carry the same small-balance apartment dynamics we work daily in Los Angeles, with agency, bank, and bridge capital all competing for stabilized buildings. The playbook in our multifamily financing practice travels intact.
CMBS refinances are the defining South Florida conversation. This market financed heavily through conduit loans, and those loans behave very differently from bank debt when a tenant leaves, a maturity approaches, or a cash out makes sense. Exiting them takes specific knowledge, from defeasance economics to which replacement lenders read Florida collateral well. We wrote the guide: CMBS loans in Miami and South Florida.
Hospitality and mixed-use round out the book. Beach-market hotels and the retail-over-everything format of Miami's urban corridors both reward the lender-matching work described on our hospitality and mixed-use pages.
The lender universe for a Miami property is national. Running it from a national desk is the advantage, not the compromise.
The honest version of "local"
Our office is at 9171 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, and we are direct about that because it is a feature of the model. South Florida owners do not lack local brokers. What many lack is access to the full national capital universe run in genuine competition: the credit unions, life companies, debt funds, and banks that never appear on a local sheet but routinely win Florida deals. Lincoln Road closed with exactly that kind of lender. We underwrite the property, build the package, fly in when the deal calls for it, and put capital sources in competition the same way we do for a building three blocks from our office.
South Florida realities we underwrite around
Insurance costs have become a proceeds question in this market, because lenders underwrite the real premium numbers and coverage follows. Condo and mixed-ownership structures carry lender-specific appetites that change year to year. Hurricane season affects closing calendars in ways out-of-market borrowers underestimate. None of these is a reason capital avoids South Florida. All of them are reasons the lender list and the underwriting need to be built for this market specifically, which is the work we do before your deal ever goes out.
If you own or are acquiring commercial real estate anywhere from Miami to Palm Beach, send us the property overview or call the desk at 310.363.5136. We respond within two business days, usually the same day.
Terms referenced reflect specific closed transactions and market conditions at the time. Piccard Financial is a capital markets advisory, not a lender. CA Broker Lic. #02159069.