What a Retail Leasing Deal Tells You About Miramar's $1 Billion Cove Project

Sunbeam Development just hired Colliers to handle retail leasing on Miramar Cove. On paper that sounds like a footnote. In practice, it is one of the more useful signals you can get about a big project before a single storefront opens.

Miramar Cove sits on 125 acres at Miramar Parkway and Red Road. When it is finished, plans call for 2,874 residences, 400,000 square feet of retail anchored by a 35,000 square foot grocer, 125,000 square feet of Class A office space, and a 185 key hotel wrapped around a 5.5 acre water basin. Stiles broke ground in May. Sunbeam expects the whole thing to be worth about $1 billion once it is built out. The target opening is late 2028.

None of that is new information. What changed on August 14 is that Sunbeam brought in a national retail leasing team, David Gabbai and Alexie Fonseca out of Orlando, Nicole Fontaine and Jake Horowitz in South Florida, to go find tenants for that 400,000 square feet.

Here is why that matters more than the groundbreaking photo did. Developers do not pay a commercial brokerage to start leasing a shopping and dining district that might get scaled back or delayed. Retail leasing starts when a project has real financing behind it and a real delivery date the developer is willing to stand behind. A groundbreaking is a ceremony. A leasing assignment is a commitment.

I have watched projects in this county get announced with fanfare and then sit for years while the renderings age on a website. I have also watched the opposite happen, where the leasing team shows up early and the project delivers close to schedule. The leasing assignment is one of the better tells I have for which version of the story I am looking at.

For homeowners in Silver Lakes, Monarch Lakes, Silver Shores, Silver Isles, Silver Falls, and the other established Miramar neighborhoods within a few miles of Miramar Parkway, this is worth paying attention to now rather than in 2028. Buyers do not wait for a ribbon cutting to start pricing in a grocery store, a hotel bar, and a walkable retail strip. They start pricing it in as soon as the project looks real. A signed leasing assignment with named brokers and a target grocer size is closer to real than a rendering.

That cuts two ways. If you are thinking about selling in that stretch of Miramar in the next year or two, you are selling into a market that has not yet fully priced in what is coming. If you are buying there, you are buying ahead of an amenity upgrade that has not shown up in comps yet. Either way, the decision changes once Miramar Cove stops being a plan and starts being a place people can point to and say it is actually happening.

None of this means the project cannot slip. Large mixed use developments in South Florida have slipped before, and 2,874 units and a hotel take real time to build even when the financing and leasing are solid. But a national leasing team with named brokers working a 400,000 square foot retail program is a meaningfully stronger signal than a groundbreaking ceremony alone, and it is the kind of detail that gets buried in a press release instead of getting the attention it deserves.

If you own property near Miramar Parkway and Red Road, or you are weighing whether to buy into that corridor before the rest of the market catches up, I am happy to walk through what I am seeing in the surrounding comps right now.

Roger Averbuj, Broker | Prestige Heritage Realty | (954) 663-8461

Source: Connect CRE, "Colliers to Lead Retail Leasing for $1B Miramar Cove," Aug. 14, 2026