Miami-Dade County has notified the owner of an 80-acre Assurant office complex near Cutler Bay that it is backing out of a $160 million deal to buy the property and transform it into a new South Dade Government Center.
A broker representing the campus’s owner, American Bankers Life Assurance — an insurance company that operates as Assurant — received a letter from the county confirming the collapse of the deal, the Miami Herald reported.
“It is with much consternation that I write to confirm that Miami-Dade County is not prepared to move forward with the acquisition of the Assurant property at this time,” Dawn Soper, director of the county’s Real Estate Division, said in the letter.
Soper’s letter was in response to a letter from Assurant asking for an update after the county seemed to hesitate on a deal it had aggressively pursued.
Earlier this month, Mayor Daniella Levine Cava signaled that Miami-Dade was reviewing several proposed building acquisitions as it prepares to present a 2025 budget that Levine Cava has said will reflect an increasingly challenging financial situation without federal COVID dollars that have previously been deployed to close revenue gaps.
The county wanted to buy the Assurant campus, located on Quail Roost Drive, so it could relocate county offices from the existing South Dade Government Center, about two miles away.
The plan was to redevelop the government center into a mixed-use complex including residential and retail in close proximity to the county performing arts center and the Southland Mall. The county also was considering using some vacant land on the Assurant property to build affordable housing.
In December, Levine Cava asked Miami-Dade commissioners to approve the Assurant deal, as well as a $205 million acquisition of a property in the western part of the county for use as another county center.
However, votes on the acquisitions were postponed after questions were raised on the pricing of the deals, which were well above market values in county appraisals. The administration agreed to renegotiate the deals; the second transaction, for a property at 9250 W. Flagler Street, was approved at a new price of $182 million.
The two sides in the Assurant deal did not agree on a new price. In its letter to the county earlier this month, an Assurant lawyer said Miami-Dade had secured new appraisals on the company’s office campus that factored in the housing potential of the property made possible by Florida’s enactment of the Live Local Act, which raised the valuation from $123 million to $170 million, the Herald reported.