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<\/p>\nIt took four years and\u00a0more than $770M for billionaire and hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin to reach the finish line in assembling a full-block site\u00a0for his company\u2019s future headquarters.<\/p>\n
The task is finally complete after Miami commissioners last week approved the Citadel founder\u2019s plan to buy the waterfront site of a 121-year-old, historically protected cottage, making way for one of the largest office\u00a0developments the city has ever seen, part of a $2.5B project also set to include an apartment building and possibly a hotel.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Courtesy of Foster + Partners\n <\/p>\n
\n The planned 54-story tower at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive would have 1.3M SF of office space and 212 hotel rooms.\n <\/p>\n
Five Miami commissioners agreed last week to sell Jackson Cottage, the city’s first doctor’s office, in a no-bid sale for $3M to Griffin. The billionaire agreed to fund the national landmark’s relocation to Coconut Grove, Dade Heritage Trust Executive Director Christine Chupp confirmed to\u00a0Bisnow.<\/p>\n
The deal would allow DHT, a preservation group that has occupied the cottage through a lease with the city since the late 1970s, to own both the cottage and the land it would sit on.<\/p>\n
Commissioners were relatively tight-lipped on the deal during the vote, besides Commissioner Miguel Gabela calling Griffin “a good corporate citizen and a man of his word,” the\u00a0Miami Herald reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Griffin, the\u00a037th-richest man in the world, started his buying spree by spending $360M in 2022 for\u00a0the 4-acre vacant lot at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive and $286.5M for an office building across the street at 1221 Brickell Ave.<\/p>\n The\u00a0billionaire purchased all of the condos<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 one by one, concealing his identity until last month \u2014\u00a0at\u00a0the 22-story Solaris building at 1155 Brickell Bay Drive behind Jackson Cottage for roughly $125M, Bloomberg reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n Demolition of the Solaris is expected to begin soon, according to a person with knowledge of Griffin’s plans.<\/p>\n The waterfront site is set to house the future headquarters of Citadel and Citadel Securities, Griffin’s market-making firm. In\u00a0the\u00a0original plans<\/a>, the 1,032-foot-tall\u00a0building included a rooftop, a 212-key hotel and only 1.3M SF of office space.<\/p>\n But after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani\u00a0called Griffin out<\/a> by name this spring in a viral video, pointing to his Manhattan condo to promote the city’s new \u201cpied-\u00e1-terre tax\u201d<\/a> on second homes worth more than $5M, Griffin said he would instead shift more Citadel employees to Miami.<\/p>\n The hotel component within the building was scrapped, though Citadel is still\u00a0considering building<\/a>\u00a0one across the street. Citadel, which\u00a0began soil-mixing<\/a> on the site to prepare for vertical construction by the end of this year, expanded the project’s office space to\u00a01.7M SF, of which the company\u00a0plans to take<\/a>\u00a0about 560K SF.<\/p>\n On his newly acquired property, Griffin also plans to build a 300-unit apartment building and a parking garage with more than 1,400 spaces.<\/p>\n With the massive project on the near-term horizon, Miami real estate players are\u00a0anticipating a whole new wave of growth in office and employment following Miami’s post-pandemic boom \u2014 which many\u00a0credit Griffin for kicking off<\/a> when he moved Citadel’s headquarters to the city from Chicago.<\/p>\n \n Ken Griffin owns the vacant waterfront lot on Brickell Bay Drive, as well as the historic cottage, parking garage and Solaris condo building across the street.\n <\/p>\n When it moved into 830 Brickell to house its temporary headquarters, now\u00a0home to 500 employees, it kicked off a wave of corporate migration, pushing office rents\u00a0to record-breaking highs<\/a>. The building is fully leased, with Peter Thiel’s family office\u00a0paying $250 per SF<\/a>\u00a0last month for 18K SF on its 44th floor.<\/p>\n Miami’s average office rents have now surpassed\u00a0New York\u2019s, according to LoopNet<\/a>.<\/p>\n Without those rent increases, office construction would be impossible, Colliers Senior Vice President Kevin Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n Many Miami professionals believe the lack of new office space is one of the main drivers in a recent slowdown in new-to-market activity \u2014 which went from making up to 21% of office activity in 2021 to 9% of activity in 2026, according to Blanca Commercial Real Estate’s second-quarter report<\/a>.<\/p>\n “These offices don’t go up without the rents to support building a new office building,” Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n “Now, you have the rents to actually support it, and you can point directly to Citadel’s entrance into this market,” he added.<\/p>\n In addition to Citadel’s office, Banco Santander broke ground in April on\u00a0a 50-story<\/a>, 1.6M SF office tower to house its headquarters and offer space to other companies \u2014 the only substantial project under construction in the city.<\/p>\n Once the new space comes online, millions of square feet will\u00a0be available\u00a0to out-of-state companies looking to\u00a0finally land new trophy space\u00a0in a supply-constrained market where vacancy has\u00a0dipped to 10.8%, according to Colliers’ second-quarter report<\/a>.<\/p>\n As of now, there are law firms and banks actively searching for space spanning more than 100K SF and tech companies looking to expand their presence, Gonzalez said.<\/p>\n And Griffin is investing\u00a0part of his vast fortune\u00a0to\u00a0convince them to join him.<\/p>\n He teamed up with billionaire developer Stephen Ross to donate a combined<\/a> $10M to Ambition Accelerated, a campaign created through The Florida Council of 100, to market the Sunshine State’s business-friendly policies to out-of-state executives.<\/p>\n In the meantime, concerns over the city’s affordability crisis are growing as the county’s population shrinks and the cost of living outpaces<\/a> New York City.<\/p>\n City officials and affordable housing developers have called on<\/a> the incoming employers from large companies to help close the gap of the more than 90,000 units needed for residents earning about $75K a year, according to a 2025 report by Miami Homes For All<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took four years and\u00a0more than $770M for billionaire and hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin to reach the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304158,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59597,6391,802,58535,123,125,124,93302,145104],"class_list":["post-355647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-miami","tag-citadel","tag-colliers","tag-ken-griffin","tag-kevin-gonzalez","tag-miami","tag-miami-headlines","tag-miami-news","tag-miami-office","tag-miami-office-rents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355647"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355647\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n