Brickell CityCentre
Brickell CityCentre
For years, some tenants at the high-end Bal Harbour Shops have wanted to open a Miami store, but their lease wouldn't allow it.
That will change when the owner of Bal Harbour Shops co-develops a shopping center at the Brickell CityCentre, now under construction south of downtown Miami.
CityCentre developer Swire Properties Inc. based in Hong Kong has partnered with the Whitman family — developer and owner of Bal Harbour Shops — to build the high-end 500,000-square-foot retail center. The 2.9 million-square-foot CityCenter also will include condominiums, hotel rooms and office space. Swire, which will remain the primary developer, began construction of the $1.05 billion complex.
Bal Harbour Shops at 9700 Collins Ave. in Bal Harbour is home to stores like Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Jimmy Choo, Prada and Roberto Cavalli.
Matthew Whitman Lazenby, operating partner at Bal Harbour Shops, said he expects some of his tenants to open in the new retail center.
"Our tenants want two things from us: larger stores — sometimes two, three, four times larger stores than what they have today — and they believe Miami is large enough to have more than one location," he said.
Like most shopping centers, Bal Harbour Shops prohibited tenants from opening competing stores within a certain radius. Owners of retail centers often charge rent based on sales volume so competing stores could hurt sales and shrink their income.
For a long time, the Whitman family had a 20-mile radius restriction. In recent years, some tenants left Bal Harbour to free themselves from that constraint.
But Bal Harbour Shops is changing its policy.
"Over the years, [the radius] evolved as our trade area evolved," Lazenby said. "Now we carefully analyze where our customers are coming from … and in some directions the [restriction] is almost as far as 20 miles and in another directions is closer to 10 miles."
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