Binder & Binder partners buy Sarasota Business Center II building

BUYER: Bin Bin Realty LLC (principals: Harry and Charles Binder), Tampa

SELLER: Porter ABD LLC

PROPERTY: 6331 Porter Road, units 1-8, building C, Sarasota

PRICE: $900,000

PREVIOUS PRICE: $849,900, August 2009

LAW FIRM ON DEED: Holly Eakin Moody Esq., Fort Lauderdale

PLANS, DESCRIPTION: Harry and Charles Binder, the partners behind the national social security disability law firm Binder & Binder, purchased a 24,000-square-foot flex building for $900,000.

The price equated to $37.50 per square foot.

The eight-unit office-warehouse condominium building was the last of five buildings constructed in the Sarasota Business Center II in 2008. It was never occupied, and its interior was never completed. The main portion of the building is 18,000 square feet and it features a 6,000-square-foot balcony.

Harry Binder says he is relocating a 20-person die striking and casting manufacturing company to the building from Long Island, N.Y.

“The attraction to Florida was the tremendous tax savings (income, sales tax, real estate tax, etc.), the savings on costs of doing business (electric, other utilities, insurance, building costs), a substantial decrease in the cost of living for employees, and the lack of snow and other weather-related business interruptions,” Binder wrote in a statement to the Business Review.

Binder says the Economic Development Corp. of Sarasota County helped persuade him to locate the firm in Sarasota, but that the company did not receive any incentives.

Loyd and Kevin Robbins of Harry E Robbins Assoc. Inc. represented the seller and Gary Roberts of Horizon Realty International represented the buyer.

At roughly the same time, AGI Group, an import and export company, agreed to lease 10,600 square feet in another building in Sarasota Business Center II from DMH LLC. Loyd and Kevin Robbins also handled the lease transaction. AGI Group is expected to take occupancy in August.

Both transactions should push the occupancy in the park up from 70% to 95%.

“Filling a building that's sat totally vacant for the past four years,” Kevin Robbins says, “ I would say that's a very positive sign for that corridor and the market.”