Santander To Demolish Brickell Office To Make Way For 41-Story Tower
At least four office towers are planned in Miami’s financial district of Brickell, with some developers searching for anchor tenants for their properties before beginning construction.
Meanwhile, Santander Bank is plowing ahead.
The Madrid-based bank will begin demolition of its Brickell office building in the next few weeks to make way for a new 41-story tower, it announced Wednesday. The new tower will replace a 14-story building at 1401 Brickell Ave. that Santander owns. It was first floated for redevelopment in February.
The planned 1.6M SF tower will have roughly 800K SF of offices, with the remaining space split between retail, common areas and a 1,496-space garage.
Plans submitted to the Miami Urban Development Review Board in February included seven food and beverage spaces totaling 108K SF, including a ground-floor café and terraced restaurants running along one side of the 13-story parking garage that would be topped with a multilevel club.
A Santander-controlled entity paid $114M in 2008 for the existing office tower and 2-acre parcel, according to property records. The 237K SF office hosts more than 650 Santander staff, primarily in its private banking department, who will move to temporary offices on Brickell Avenue and in Coconut Grove during construction.
A spokesperson for Santander declined to comment on the announcement, but the company said demolition will begin “in the next few weeks” and that the project will be “completed over the next several years.”
“The Miami market remains a key connection point between North America, Latin America and Europe, and Santander remains committed to having a presence in this international technology and financial hub,” the company said in the release.
Santander will only occupy a portion of the office space at the completed 765-foot-tall tower designed by New York-based Handel Architects. Brickell-based Rilea Group will coordinate construction.
If demolition begins, it would be the second Brickell site cleared to make way for a new office tower since May 2023.
But it is possible, if not likely, that it will be the first new tower to go vertical since 830 Brickell, the 57-story tower that broke ground in 2020, leased up rapidly during the pandemic and spurred other developers to eye the neighborhood for construction.
Related Cos. and Swire Properties began demolition in May 2023 at 700 Brickell Ave. to make way for a planned supertall office tower called One Brickell City Centre.
But questions are swirling around whether the tower will actually be built, with The Wall Street Journal reporting in March that Swire had considered selling the 1.6-acre development site as it struggled to find a tenant to anchor the project. Swire denied the report, but vertical construction hasn't commenced.
Local developer Key International partnered with Chicago-based Sterling Bay to propose a 51-story tower at 848 Brickell Ave. JLL has been tapped to lease the property, and the developer is waiting until an anchor tenant is secured before moving forward on the project.
Citadel, the Ken Griffin-led hedge fund that announced a move from Chicago to Miami in June 2022, has also been slowly advancing plans for a new headquarters tower at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive that would include a hotel and retail space.
Citadel will set up shop in 130K SF at 830 Brickell while it builds the new headquarters. That tower, developed by OKO Group and Cain International, was initially slated to deliver in 2022, but tenants are only now building out their spaces and are expected to move in by year’s end.
