EastGroup Pays $25.7 Million for Hialeah Gardens Site Eyed for 371,000-Square-Foot Logistics Hub

HIALEAH GARDENS — The busiest commercial sale in South Florida for mid-October was not a Brickell tower or a Miami Beach hotel. It was dirt in Hialeah Gardens, priced for warehouses.

An affiliate of Jackson, Mississippi-based EastGroup Properties, led by CEO Marshall A. Loeb, paid $25.7 million for a 24.9-acre industrial development site at the northeast corner of West Okeechobee Road, The Real Deal reported for transactions dated Oct. 21. The price works out to roughly $1 million an acre. The seller was F 68-4 and F 69-2 LLC, an entity led by Lowell S. Dunn and Lowell S. Dunn II.

What EastGroup Plans to Build

EastGroup has already put a name on the project. According to Groundbreak Miami, the REIT proposes Avanza Logistics Center, two warehouses totaling 371,463 square feet at West Okeechobee Road and Northwest 92nd Avenue. Groundbreak puts the purchase price at $25.67 million for 24.88 acres.

Last year, a different developer had filed plans to rezone the property from single-family residential to commercial business for a similar two-warehouse concept of about 371,460 square feet, according to reporting cited by The Real Deal from the South Florida Business Journal. EastGroup’s entry suggests the industrial thesis for that corner survived the ownership change.

Why Hialeah Gardens

West Okeechobee Road sits in the Airport West / Doral / Medley industrial belt that feeds Miami International Airport, the Port of Miami and the region’s last-mile delivery network. For a logistics REIT, that corridor is the product: truck access, labor within driving distance and tenants who need modern clear-height space more than a skyline view.

Groundbreak notes that the Hialeah Gardens warehouse submarket posted an 8.6% vacancy rate, which leaves room for new supply if EastGroup can lease into demand rather than into an overbuilt pocket. Institutional buyers have been selective about South Florida industrial since the pandemic boom cooled, which makes a nearly $26 million land bet a statement that this corner still pencils.

A Familiar Institutional Buyer

EastGroup is not a speculative flip shop. The publicly traded industrial REIT specializes in shallow-bay and last-mile product across the Sun Belt. Buying entitled or entitleable dirt, then building for its own portfolio, is core to how it compounds square footage. The Dunn family’s exit also fits a longer Miami pattern: local landowners assemble parcels over years, then sell into a national platform that can finance vertical construction at scale.

Why It Matters for Miami Business

Industrial real estate rarely makes the dinner-party circuit the way a Faena loan or a Brickell condo launch does. It still underwrites the city’s consumer and trade economy. Every restaurant group, e-commerce seller and medical distributor in Miami-Dade eventually needs a box within a short truck run of the airport and the port.

Brokerages tracking Airport West have spent the past two years watching land prices stay firm even as speculative construction slowed. Paying roughly $1 million an acre for entitleable dirt in Hialeah Gardens is a bet that modern shallow-bay product will keep leasing to third-party logistics firms, retailers and light manufacturers who cannot wait for a distant inland warehouse. For local contractors and brokers, an EastGroup-scale vertical build would also mean a multi-year pipeline of shell work, tenant improvements and leasing commissions that smaller land flips never generate.

If Avanza Logistics Center moves from proposal to vertical construction, it will add hundreds of thousands of square feet of modern warehouse inventory to a submarket that has been absorbing space for years. That is the more practical headline for Miami’s operating companies than another waterfront teardown. The open question is timing: entitlements, construction costs and lease rates will decide whether EastGroup’s $25.7 million land check looks shrewd in two years or merely expensive.