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Wynwood’s first new office building set to launch

The Cube Wynwd office and retail building will stand at 222 N.W. 24th St.

RedSky Capital has decided to launch the first new office building in Miami’s booming Wynwood neighborhood as a speculative building project.

The Brooklyn-based developer hired Blanca Commercial Real Estate to lease the 79,548 square feet of office space for the eight-story Cube Wynwd project proposed at 222 N.W. 24th Street. The 13,840-square-foot site is next to popular Miami-born brand Panther Coffee.

As Wynwood has transformed from an industrial area to an arts district, many restaurants and retailers have moved into the neighborhood. In recent years, small businesses such as law firms, architecture firms, and coding schools have found a home in Wynwood. Most of these small businesses inhabit repurposed warehouses because there are few traditional office buildings.

Tere Blanca, CEO of Blanca Commercial, said she’s fielded many requests from major corporations and tech companies for space in Wynwood, but there hasn’t been a building that suits their needs.

“When you have a neighborhood that has such a defined appeal and the ability to serve business users with residential, food and beverage, and culture and entertainment, then office is bound to succeed,” Blanca said. “The employers will follow the workforce.”

Blanca said RedSky Capital is prepared to build Cube Wynwd before signing any pre-leases. It plans to break ground in early 2017 and complete the project the following year. In addition to the office space, Cube Wynwd will have 11,364 square feet of ground-floor retail, a rooftop terrace and a breezeway for pedestrians.

“RedSky Capital is excited to apply our forward-thinking vision to the development of Cube Wynwyd, which will plant a flag as the first new office building in the submarket,” said Benjamin Bernstein, co-founder and president of RedSky Capital. “We are proud to help lead the evolution of Wynwood to become a more diverse ecosystem and business district supporting Miami’s positioning as a global destination for investment.”

RedSky Capital acquired the property for $5.85 million and hired Arquitectonica to design it. The city has already approved its plans.

Source: BizJournal

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Miami’s Wynwood District is the World’s Annual Street Art Mecca

Streets of Wynwood: a wild ride into the riot of color, creativity and chaos that is Miami’s street art scene.

Every year during the Art Basel fair, street artists from around the globe converge on Miami’s Wynwood district to transform its streets anew with a riot of creative colors. Streets of Wynwood transports the viewer into this nomadic subculture to meet some of world’s best exponents of urban art and to appreciate first-hand how this once clandestine tribe of taggers, graffiti writers and muralists have claimed their place in the broader art world. It’s a dazzling experience.

Streets of Wynwood, a new film from WLRN Public Television, takes us inside this fascinating yet little-known global subculture that spans the artistic gamut from “tagging” and graffiti to towering murals of astonishing quality. Some might endure for years, while others vanish, or are defaced, within days of completion.

A Burgeoning Art Scene

Filmed by multiple camera crews during recent Art Basel Miami festivals, the film is both an immersive journey into an eye-popping street art jamboree, unparalleled in any other city, and a thoughtful exploration of a burgeoning artistic movement whose greatest exponents, like America’s Shepard Fairey, Brazil’s Eduardo Kobra, South Africa’s Faith47, and the mysterious Londoner known as Banksy, are today highly prized by art collectors, galleries and museums.   It’s a beautiful and energetic world, fraught with danger.

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5 Reasons to Renew Your Office Lease

Here are five reasons it might be time to stick around and renew your office lease.

You’ve had little or no growth

Not every growing business needs to take on additional office space. Depending on your industry, you might need to hire more people who work in the field and not at a desk. If that’s the case, then you don’t need any additional square footage, and if your business is stable or has had little growth, the space that you’re in likely still works just fine.

You don’t have enough savings to move

Relocating can be expensive. Consider that you will need to pay for the physical move, the wiring, changing your letterhead, buying new furniture, and so on. Even if you find a space that could save you $100k on your next lease, it might not make financial sense because your move will eat up the entire cost savings, if not more.

You’re already in the perfect location

You love your building, your staff loves your building, and overall it works for everyone. What’s the expression? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it? The same goes here. If everyone is happy and business is good, then renew your lease.

You’re in a tightening market

In rare instances, there just isn’t any space available that meets your criteria. Depending on your market there can be a shortage of vacant space. If that’s the case, it’s crucial to fully understand the market so you can negotiate the best possible terms on a renewal. Your best bet is to hire a knowledgeable broker to do this for you.

You can negotiate better renewal terms

Since the day you signed your current lease, your expenses have been going up, in one way or another. Given that there will almost always be vacant space, it’s fair to at least take a look at what’s available. If you start looking, your current Landlord will almost always catch wind of it and will do as much as they can to get you to stay. That usually means reducing the rent, updating your space, or one throwing in other types of concessions. As long as your Landlord is offering fair terms and you’re happy with your situation, then renewing is probably the path of least resistance.

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The Pros And Cons Of An Open Office Environment

Open-plan office designs are shown to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing

In case you haven’t heard, private offices and cubicles are obsolete. Companies large and small in nearly all industries are migrating toward open-plan office designs. Apart from the cost efficiency that comes from accommodating more employees in less physical space, the primary goal is collaboration. Studies show that employees of high-performing companies spend more time in collaborative activities than their counterparts in average-performing firms. Office design, in turn, has a major impact on how employees collaborate with each other. It’s hard to argue that open bench seating isn’t far more conducive to collaboration than rows of cubes and offices with doors.

One of the most influential business leaders of modern history understood this intuitively. Steve Jobs famously dictated that all the restrooms at Pixar’s then-new office campus be located in the center of the building. The idea was to force employees of all ranks and roles to have chance meetings with each other several times each day. The same general idea has since caught on more broadly with constant collaboration now designed into employee workstations themselves. Walls and private space are out, transparency and mobility are in.

The downside of openness

However, there is a strong counterpoint to the open-plan paradigm. A few years ago, Time.com published an article that described the open office as “a hotbed of stress.” According to Annie Murphy Paul, a noted expert on human learning, “several decades of research have confirmed that open-plan offices are generally associated with greater employee stress, poorer co-worker relations and reduced satisfaction with the physical environment.” The articles goes on to describe a study in which the “low-intensity noise” of an open office environment is shown to reduce the mental stamina of test subjects. A more recent study by the Dublin Institute of Technology confirmed this point of view. In a survey of 150 knowledge workers across various age groups and industries, 63% of those working in an open plan environment said that the design of their office space had a negative impact on their ability to focus and concentrate.

Then again, the Dublin study also validated the “pros” of the open plan. Fully 80% of survey respondents, presumably including those who found it difficult to concentrate, admitted that an open plan had a positive impact on collaboration with others. Similar positive opinions were voiced in regard to team cohesion, knowledge sharing and social interaction.

Finding the right balance

And therein lies the trade-off. Open-plan office designs are shown to improve collaboration and knowledge sharing but at the expense of heightened employee stress, dissatisfaction with the physical work environment and a reduced ability to concentrate on focused tasks. Is the end result a net positive or a net negative? Only you and your employees can say for sure, but it does lend credence to the recommendations of the Dublin team and office design experts everywhere.

If you do pursue an open-plan design for your office space, be sure to invest in noise mitigation measures and provide ready access to private spaces where employees can “hide out” from the openness. The ideal office environment appears to be a hybrid with some spaces that encourage free-flowing collaboration and other spaces that enable employees to wall themselves off – whether that be physically, mentally, visually or sonically – to focus on the task at hand.

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