Lease rates on the rise in Sarasota

SARASOTA — The Gateway Professional Center in Sarasota, with seven recent new and renewed lease agreements, has rebounded significantly from the downturn, part of an overall uptick in the commercial real estate market.

Pointe Group Advisors, a Miami-based brokerage and commercial real estate management firm, recently announced seven new leases at Gateway, according to a release. Kelley Matheson, a leasing broker associate with Pointe Group, says the market, in general, is “changing from a tenant's market to more of a neutral market, with concessions easing.”

Adds Matheson: “As we see more absorption, we also see asking rental-rates starting to rise.”

The Gateway leases totaled more than 75,000 square feet. Tenants include Jackson Hewitt, which renewed a 33,645-square-foot lease, and Global Financial Private Capital, which signed a new lease for 27,186 square feet.

“The office market is improving, especially in the I-75 corridor of Sarasota County,” Pointe Group Advisors vice president of leasing Alfie Hamilton says in the release. “We saw occupancy at the Gateway Professional Center drop to 50% in early 2012, and with these recently closed deals, we have now broken the 85% occupancy threshold.”

Pointe Group Advisors also announced several lease renewals for the Northern Trust Plaza, an 11-story office tower in downtown Sarasota. Those leases are for more than 8,500 square feet.

“All of the submarkets on the West Coast of Florida were hit hard during the recession,” Matheson says in the release. “It was not until 2013 that the commercial real estate market in this area began to fully recover.”

Pointe Group Advisors has offices in Sarasota, St. Petersburg, Miami and Fort Lauderdale, with more than 10 million square feet of commercial space under management and leasing.