Real estate billionaire Charles Cohen is catching a second wind after resolving his debt woes with longtime lender Fortress Investment Group this summer.
Courtesy of Cohen Brothers Realty Corporation of Florida
The development encompasses two office buildings and two parking garages.
Cohen Brothers Realty Corp., which Cohen leads as CEO and chairman, is planning a $350M office project in Dania Beach near Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.
Plans include two 10-story office towers with floor plates that will span roughly 14K SF, connected with terraces and promenades and two four-story parking garages, according to a news release.
The project, named Office Center of the Americas, will feature 400K SF of office space designed by Nichols Brosch Wurst Wolfe & Associates. Cohen is planning to build the project in two phases over about four years.
New York-based Cooper Horowitz is handling construction financing.
“We couldn’t be more excited about this new project,” Cohen said in a statement.
OCTA will rise at 1805 and 1815 Griffin Road, replacing the 60K SF, four-story office building within the Design Center of the Americas campus that Cohen purchased in 2006 for $13.7M, according to the Broward County property appraiser.
The 40-year-old building will be torn down to make way for the new development, a spokesperson for Cohen confirmed.
While the current building is attached to the DCOTA brand, it isn’t connected to the neighboring showroom and office at 1855 Griffin Road, which Cohen lost in a UCC foreclosure auction in 2024 to Fortress Investment Group after defaulting on a $534M loan originated in 2022.
Fortress has since invested roughly $3M in updating the campus, tapped Atlanta-based Jamestown to lead asset management, leasing and marketing, and landed a $45M refinancing loan.
Cohen and Fortress were locked in a bitter, yearslong legal dispute over the 2022 loan after the foreclosure, which didn’t satisfy the outstanding debt. The Le Méridien hotel in Dania Beach, as well as a New York property and a UK theater company, were also sold as part of the foreclosure.
But those properties didn’t come close to paying off the balance of the loan, and Fortress went after Cohen, who had personally guaranteed the debt. It accused him of shielding assets and even had a yacht temporarily seized.
A New York court ordered Cohen last year to pay Fortress $187.3M to cover the guarantee. While he started to sell off properties to cure the debt, Fortress accused him of slow-walking the process and began pushing for a receiver to take over his company’s 12M SF portfolio.
Amid the dispute, Cohen Brothers lost its 350K SF Manhattan headquarters to its lender in a foreclosure auction in January. In March, a New York state judge ordered Cohen to come up with $135M in 45 days, or a chunk of his company assets would be handed over to Fortress.
The dispute came to a close when Cohen satisfied the outstanding balance in June after selling multiple office buildings and pieces of land in New York, paying off the $187.3M, plus interest and attorney fees.
But Cohen wasn’t ready to forgive and forget. Later that week, he filed a separate lawsuit against Fortress, seeking $203.7M in damages over what he claimed was a botched sale process.
But without the cloud of forced payments hanging over him, the developer is getting back on his feet in South Florida, where the project announcement marks his second new endeavor this summer.
After resolving a $10M foreclosure claim for a site he owns in Downtown West Palm Beach in July, the billionaire has revisited plans for another 400K SF office project, The Real Deal reported.
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