Rent Discounts Drive Rebound In Miami Office Leasing

After years of dramatic increases in rents, it is now discount season in the Miami office market.

Average asking rents in Miami were flat between the third and fourth quarters, rising just a penny to $63.06 per SF, according to Savills' year-end office report. But under the surface, prices dropped.

Effective rents, which account for concessions like tenant improvement allowances and periods of free rent, dropped 32% over the first three quarters of 2025, according to CompStak data provided to Bisnow. That means the average rent tenants agreed to pay over the course of their leases last year fell from roughly $62 per SF in January to about $48 per SF in September.

“Landlords are not super eager to start lowering rents on the surface, but to entice tenants, they will increase concessions packages, effectively lowering the effective rent,” JLL senior research analyst Rachel Dickinson said.

The free rent ratio has risen above pre-pandemic levels, now taking about 4.6% of lease terms, which is 1.1% higher than 2019 levels, according to CompStak.

Tenants have jumped on the deals, which now average eight months of free rent plus rising TI packages. There were 5M SF of leases signed for Miami office space in 2025, a 36% increase from 2024, according to Savills.

The jump in activity after a down 2024 came as a surprise to Savills senior research analyst Andrea Duque.

“Especially because during the whole year, I was hearing comments from the brokers saying that activity was slow,” Duque said. “So that did surprise me.”

The area's effective rents are still 30% higher than they were in 2019, according to CompStak, far outpacing the national average for rent growth. Even in Manhattan, the strongest office market in the country last year, average asking rents have yet to recover to their 2019 levels, according to Colliers.

By contrast, between 2020 and 2025, asking rents in Miami rose more than 50%, according to a third-quarter Savills report. The rise was driven by new-to-market activity — companies from New York and California were used to paying twice as much for offices in their home states and drove up the price for the limited supply of top-notch space.

In Brickell, Miami's financial district, asking rents have more than doubled since the pandemic, and until mid-2024, they were still shooting up. 

But a slowdown in corporate migrations was mirrored by landlords' asking rents, which grew just 5% between 2024 and 2025, Duque wrote to Bisnow in an email. The last time Miami saw annual rent growth that slow was in 2020, when asking rates rose 3.7%. 

“Based on this, we could say that rent growth is cooling and normalizing toward the more typical market rent trends Miami experienced prior to the pandemic,” Duque wrote.

Asking rents in Miami’s most expensive market, Miami Beach, still increased by about a dollar to $110.63 per SF, although asking rents in Brickell decreased by nearly $2 per SF to $88.86, according to Savills.

In Colliers' preliminary numbers, average asking rents in Miami-Dade County decreased by 17 cents per SF to $65.20.

Several deals signed in the fourth quarter consisted of tenants moving to more affordable submarkets, such as Fowler White Burnett, which moved from the Brickell Arch building to Citigroup Center in Downtown Miami. 

City National Bank renewed its 36K SF lease at 1450 Brickell Ave., despite signing a 145K SF lease in April, one of the largest of the year, for a new headquarters in Coral Gables.

Along with sliding rents, another trend is emerging, Duque said: a rise in subleasing. 

One of the largest deals of the fourth quarter was a sublease. Restaurant Brands International, the parent of Burger King and Popeyes, signed a 43K SF sublease from L’Oréal in the Waterford Business District.

Duque said she expects larger sublease spaces to enter the market and compete with direct space, especially since tenants can be more flexible with the rents they offer than landlords, who lean more on concessions to get deals signed. 

“They never really [say], ‘Oh, we're asking this,’” Duque said of companies with space listed on the sublease market. “It's like, ‘Let's see how much we can get.’”