Baptist Health South Florida has paid $39 million for the former City National Bank of Florida headquarters at 2855 South Le Jeune Road in Coral Gables, picking up a four-story office building just months after the bank moved its workforce out. The deal lands as Coral Gables office sales climb and as South Florida's largest health systems race to lock down real estate across the region.
The building spans either 121,418 or 124,168 square feet depending on the source, with the two figures producing different price-per-square-foot calculations, according to Commercial Observer and CRE News, which put the per-square-foot price at $314.09. The property was built in 2007 on a 0.7-acre site, Commercial Observer reports. What Baptist Health plans to do with the building remains unclear — the outlet notes that “it's unclear how Baptist Health South Florida, one of the largest health networks in the region, plans to use the building.”
City National Bank sold the property after relocating its Miami-Dade County workforce earlier this year into a new 144,878-square-foot, 15-story tower at 2701 South Le Jeune Road, just down the street. The bank signed that lease in 2025 to consolidate its operations under one roof, per Commercial Observer's reporting.
Coral Gables Office Market Heats Up
The sale lands amid a broader uptick in Coral Gables office activity. Commercial Observer notes the submarket has seen a string of big transactions recently, including PGIM's July sale of a 717,805-square-foot asset for nearly $100 million and Deutsche Bank's January sale of a three-acre property for close to $120 million.
Rents in the submarket reflect that momentum. Coral Gables-Downtown posted an average office asking rent of $67.20 per square foot with vacancy at just 8.0 percent in July, according to Miami Realtors, which also found that Miami-area asking rents overall rose 5.3 percent year-over-year to $60.30 per square foot. Demand for premium office space has been especially strong among technology, finance and medical-care tenants, the group reported.
Baptist Health's Broader Expansion Push
The Coral Gables purchase is just one piece of a larger building spree for Baptist Health. The system broke ground on its first Broward County hospital in Sunrise, a seven-story, 340,000-square-foot facility with 100 inpatient beds expected to cost more than $500 million and open in 2029, according to a statement from Baptist Health.
Baptist Health is also building a 60,865-square-foot medical center in Pembroke Pines, with completion expected early next year, and it broke ground on a Royal Palm Beach facility that will include a free-standing emergency department and medical offices, according to the South Florida Business Journal. The system has also paid $53.5 million for a Kohl's department store building in Coconut Creek, as part of its growing real estate footprint.
Broward Becomes a Health Care Battleground
The flurry of acquisitions reflects a wider fight for scarce development sites across Broward County, where The Real Deal describes the county as having “emerged as a medical development battleground.” Medical office absorption hit 82,300 square feet in the second quarter even as vacancy rose to 12.5 percent amid declining sales volumes, the outlet reports. The county's population aged 75 and older is projected to grow 48 percent through 2033, a demographic shift driving much of the new construction.
Memorial Healthcare and Broward Health jointly bid $14.3 million for a 25-acre Sunrise site in 2022 but lost out to Baptist Health, the same report notes. Memorial Healthcare has since paid $69 million for the 254,000-square-foot Venture Center office complex in Hollywood — a property that last sold for $50 million in 2021 — and its board approved a $670 million expansion of Memorial Regional Hospital. Broward Health, meanwhile, is pouring roughly $300 million into five new developments, including freestanding emergency rooms in Lighthouse Point and Sunrise.
