Citadel Eyes Luxury Hotel Atop $1B Miami Headquarters
Citadel isn't planning on just hosting its hedge fund staffers at its planned headquarters on the waters of Biscayne Bay.
The company is planning to include a luxury hotel on the upper floors of its upcoming $1B headquarters project, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Ken Griffin-led firm has tapped Foster + Partners to design the tower, which is expected to be one of the tallest buildings in Miami.
“It’s a unique opportunity to build an iconic building in Miami for Citadel’s future,” Citadel Chief Operating Officer Gerald Beeson told the WSJ.
Citadel paid a record-breaking $363M for the 2.5-acre site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive in April 2022, two months before it was reported that the firm was relocating its headquarters from Chicago to Miami. It initially tapped Chicago developer Sterling Bay to lead the development but broke off that partnership last April.
Last month, Citadel named Google real estate executive Paul Darrah as its chief workplace officer, bringing on board his experience of developing Google's $2B new campus in Manhattan's Hudson Square. Darrah said, “I'm going to plead the fifth on that” when asked at a University of Miami conference on Feb. 23 about plans for the new HQ, Bisnow previously reported.
The site has sat vacant for years, and Citadel has not said when construction would begin. Griffin told Bloomberg in September 2022 that he planned to make office space in the building available to lease to other tenants. It's unclear if that is still the case with the updated plans for a hotel.
“I'm going to work to create a building that's iconic in Miami,” Griffin said in 2022. “If it takes longer to fill the building, so be it. It's more important to me to create the right environment to draw human capital that drives Citadel.”
Griffin and Citadel have been building up a property portfolio throughout South Florida. Citadel has spent hundreds of millions to amass more land around 1201 Brickell Bay Drive, but the efforts to develop a plan for those properties have run into complications, per the WSJ.
In June, an entity tied to Griffin paid $83M for an office building in Palm Beach, next door to a building Citadel acquired in 2022 to serve as a Palm Beach office for the hedge fund.
For now, Citadel has leased 130K SF across six floors at OKO Group and Cain International's 830 Brickell tower to serve as its temporary Miami headquarters, Darrah told the WSJ. Citadel was previously reported to have leased 90K SF in the tower. Miami-based Citadel employees today work out of the Southeast Financial Center.
