Tere Blanca is marketing the scarcest commodity in Miami real estate.

Her firm, Blanca Commercial Real Estate, has been tapped to lease 560K SF of office space in a Brickell skyscraper that broke ground this spring. The project, a new headquarters for Banco Santander, is the first office tower to rise in the city's urban core since the onset of the pandemic.

It will be closely followed by an even bigger project helmed by Citadel founder Ken Griffin. The two towers are expected to be game-changing developments, charge record rents and kick-start another wave of corporate relocations to the Magic City.

“When you have great infrastructure and good design in these trophy assets, the first tower to deliver in a cycle performs exceedingly well in this market,” Blanca said.

The Santander and Citadel towers will add more than 1M SF of offices available to outside companies when they are completed, expected in 2029 and 2031, respectively. The last time so much space was built in Brickell was during the Great Recession, according to data provided by Colliers.

The buildings are expected to kick off a whole new generation of corporate growth in the city’s financial hub, where new supply has lagged substantial employment growth.

In the years since the last Brickell tower broke ground, office rents in the city rose to historic highs and an influx of wealthy executives have moved to South Florida and are opening offices for their companies in the neighborhoods they now live in. 

But even while the city has become one of the tightest office markets in the nation, leasing has slowed significantly from its boom era, dropping by 20% this year from 2022 and 2023, The Real Deal reported, citing CoStar data. By some measures, leasing has dipped below 2019 levels.

The issue isn't a lack of demand, brokers said. It is the lack of supply capable of welcoming a large corporate entity.

Developers have built more than 1M SF of Miami office space since 2024, according to Colliers, but most of the inventory is made up of boutique space, often targeted toward smaller, noninstitutional tenants like family offices, or it is outside of the city’s central business district.

While the boutiques are landing high-profile tenants — like Playboy, which signed a 20K SF lease for its headquarters in Miami Beach — these buildings can't accommodate the companies that are scouring the market for 100K SF or more.

“The reality is that we’re desperate for new space,” said Steven Hurwitz, JLL executive managing director and South Florida agency lead.

Tower Shortage

When Apollo Global Management was looking for a location for a second headquarters outside of New York City, it explored options in Miami, West Palm Beach, Austin and Nashville.

But the private equity behemoth reportedly plans to lease roughly 250K SF for its employees — and there is no office tower in South Florida's biggest city with that much space available. Apollo chose Austin, where several office towers have risen in recent years.

Multiple confidential or anonymous tenants seeking between 200K SF and 500K SF of office space have hired brokers to perform an analysis of Miami, Cushman & Wakefield Executive Managing Director Andrew Trench said.

The response is fairly standard: The space these companies need isn’t yet built, he said.

“Unfortunately, what's happened, I think, is that because there's not a more immediate opportunity, those companies have either tabled it or just sort of stepped away from the concept of moving to Miami,” Trench said.

Hurwitz said there is a confidential 300K SF to 500K SF tenant poking around Miami at the moment with concerns about the lack of new office space.

“Their brokers are trying to unleash or unfold opportunities, and they're not plentiful,” he said.

Brickell is among the tightest markets in all of Miami, at an 11.8% Class-A direct vacancy rate, according to Colliers.

830 Brickell was the first Class-A office space to hit Brickell in a decade, and its office space has become the most coveted in the neighborhood.

When 830 Brickell started leasing in 2019, its ceiling was between $65 and $70 per SF. But when demand picked up in 2021, landing out-of-town tenants like Microsoft, Thoma Bravo and CI Financial, rents broke triple digits.

The 57-story skyscraper, developed by OKO Group and Cain, has barely had any space to spare since it delivered fully leased in 2024. It houses Citadel's current headquarters and a 115K SF Kirkland & Ellis office.

“The fact that that building leased up quickly is a testament to the demand for new product by companies migrating here,” Blanca said.

Even when 27K SF opened up in late 2025, it was quickly gobbled up by Peter Thiel’s family office and private investment firm Eldridge, which owns Cain. Thiel's office paid $250 per SF — more than triple the building's initial asking rents and by far a Miami record.

Despite OKO and Cain's smashing success, no developers have been able to replicate it.

Financing the construction of an office building often requires a preleased anchor tenant, but landing one without construction already underway has proven impossible.

Related Cos. and Swire Properties hit that wall when they planned in 2022 to build a 1.6M SF, 1,000-foot office tower called One Brickell City Centre. Even though they held a groundbreaking ceremony, they never found a company willing to commit to enough space to kick off construction.

They scrapped the office idea and sold the site to multifamily developer The Melo Group for $211.5M in May 2025.

That calculus is different for Banco Santander and Griffin.

“It is very hard to prelease, and it's not a coincidence in my mind that the buildings that are being built are generally owner-occupied, because they come with their own tenancy,” Hurwitz said.

New Era

Spanish institution Banco Santander bought the 14-story office building at 1401 Brickell Ave. that serves as its Miami HQ for $114M in 2008. In 2017, it explored selling the site to developers, but that went nowhere.

Seven years later, the bank announced its plans to tear down its building at 1401 Brickell Ave. for a new headquarters. It initially proposed a 40-story tower with 613K SF of office space and 108K SF of retail.

But by the time it secured approval and tore the structure down in 2025, it boosted the plans. The building is now set to rise 50 stories and span more than 1M SF, with 165K SF of retail, 560K SF of marketable offices, plus Santander's HQ and a multilevel parking deck. A groundbreaking ceremony was held in April.

The bank and Blanca declined to comment on the total amount of office space it will take for its own headquarters.

Brickell asking rents are already among the highest in Miami, at $93.03 per SF, second only to Coconut Grove's nearly $100-per-SF average, according to Colliers.

Triple-net asking rents at the Santander tower will start below $200 per SF, Blanca said.

But the most coveted spaces at that building and at the Citadel tower are expected to rent for more than $300 per SF, which would be unheard of for the city and rare even for established markets like New York City.

“I don't think it will start there, but I think it would be naive for me to cap on where it could go,” Trench said.

Interest is coming in from new-to-market companies and businesses already in the market itching to expand, Blanca said.

Financial services, professional services and technology companies are at the forefront of interested tenants, she said.

An even higher-profile building isn't far behind.

Citadel Chief Workplace Officer Paul Darrah told Bisnow in June that the company, which began soil-mixing earlier this year, plans to go vertical on its next HQ by the fourth quarter, setting its completion date for the early 2030s.

Citadel’s entrance into Miami in 2022 is often credited as the catalyst for the wave of corporate migration, creating a need for more corporate space as other businesses looked to follow.

“Miami was never a big corporate America city, ever,” Savills Vice Chairman and co-Head of the Florida Region Donna Abood said.

“We were the kind of city where we welcomed business in, but suddenly we had headquarters here that was also sending business out to other markets.”

The company moved into 830 Brickell, where it now houses 500 employees, while it preps its $2.5B headquarters. Griffin completed his assemblage of a full-block site in July — which included purchasing a 121-year-old, historically protected cottage and executing a condo buyout — spending more than $770M.

Griffin filed plans for a 1.7M SF office building on the water off of Brickell Bay Drive. The company plans to take about 560K SF, an increase after scrapping plans for a 212-key hotel.

Citadel didn’t respond to a detailed list of questions about who is handling marketing and leasing for the office space and what asking rents will be.

Regardless, the roughly 1M SF of available office space at the tower — and its affiliation with a titan of Wall Street like Griffin — is expected to ensure the next Apollo-sized opportunity doesn't pass Miami by.

“It's what clients are asking for, and I do think ultimately, it will galvanize a next wave of business migration to the city,” Trench said.