Stephen Ross Is Buying Boca Offices — Again

ByEric Levy, PA

While plenty of investors are still running from office buildings, Stephen Ross is buying them in Boca Raton. Again.

Related Ross, the firm of billionaire developer Stephen Ross, has paid $64 million for North 40, a two-building office complex of 380,000 square feet at Congress Avenue and Yamato Road, right by the BRiC campus. The October reporting on the deal notes that this is his second Boca office acquisition.

A second purchase matters more than a first. A first purchase can be opportunism, a good price on a particular asset on a particular day. A second purchase, in the same city and the same unfashionable asset class, looks like a position. Ross is not buying a single building that happened to be cheap. He is building exposure to Boca offices, at a moment when the conventional view of offices nationally remains cautious.

It helps to understand the bet in plain terms. Office value follows employers. Employers follow executives, and executives have been choosing Boca. If companies keep relocating executives and headquarters functions here, as the October issue put it, then well-located office space in Boca is not the same asset as office space in a central business district that is emptying out. The building is only the container. The demand inside it is the investment.

North 40’s location is part of that reading. Congress and Yamato puts it by the BRiC campus, in the same broad corridor where Boca has been adding residences, retail, and new households. The corridor story is not one project. It is an office purchase here, a plaza sale there, apartment construction and approvals continuing alongside. An investor buying offices in a corridor that is also adding rooftops is buying into both sides of the equation the October issue identified: jobs and rooftops are what hold home values up over time.

For homeowners, office deals can feel distant. A 380,000-square-foot complex does not appear in a comparable-sales report for your house. Its effect is slower and more structural than that. Executives and employees who move for work need somewhere to live, and they tend to buy in the same quality bands, in the same school and club geographies, that already define Boca’s upper market. Sustained employment demand is one of the reasons a residential market stays supported when other second-home markets soften.

That does not make every office purchase good news, and this article makes no claim about North 40’s tenancy, terms, or plans beyond what was reported in October. Those specifics were not in the approved issue and are not added here. What was reported is enough to support the narrower, stronger point: a sophisticated buyer, with a choice of markets across the country, has now twice chosen to buy Boca offices with serious money.

Contrast is instructive. In many cities, the office story is about landlords handing keys back and buyers demanding distressed prices. In Boca this month, the office story sits alongside a $90.3 million grocery-plaza sale, a downtown trophy office that was 64 percent leased before completion, and a branded condominium that was half sold before construction started. Read together, those are not isolated headlines. They are different kinds of capital arriving at the same conclusion about the same city.

For an owner weighing timing, that is the usable takeaway. Residential values in a place like Boca are held up over a decade by exactly this kind of unglamorous, cumulative investment: an employer base that grows, retail that gets re-bought at higher prices, and new residents who arrive with a reason to be here. No single deal guarantees a result on any single street. A pattern of deals, from buyers of this caliber, is the closest thing a market gives you to a forward indicator.

Read next: Boca Raton New Developments · A Publix Plaza on Yamato Road Just Sold for $90.3 Million · Market Report

Sources (from the approved October 2026 issue):

By Eric Levy, PA — Coldwell Banker Realty, Boca Raton · (561) 654-6199 · Eric.levy@cbrealty.com · ericlevypa.com
Best of Zillow agent · 88 Zillow reviews at 4.9 stars · Ranked in the top 0.33% of 3,602 Boca Raton agents

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