Brickell

Trevor L Taylor is a Miami private investor and the founder of Fortius Capital, and Brickell is the Miami district where the city’s real estate story is most visible. It sits just south of the Miami River along Biscayne Bay, a narrow band of towers that holds banks, law and finance offices, hotels and tens of thousands of condominium and rental units. Few American neighborhoods have changed so completely within living memory, and that change explains much about how Miami property is priced today.

From mansion row to towers

Brickell began as a residential address for the wealthy. A Miami Herald photo archive shows Brickell Avenue in 1961, when mansions lined the road¹ before the skyscrapers arrived, and the first two Four Ambassadors hotel apartment towers, each 20 stories, photographed in 1966. The same archive shows Claughton Island being developed in 1981 for marketing as Brickell Key, the private island at the mouth of the river.

Fragments of the older city survive among the towers, and they are now prized land. WLRN reported that the city commission unanimously approved a $3 million sale of the Jackson Cottage land² to the company of Citadel founder Ken Griffin for a planned 54 story headquarters. The cottage was the early 1900s office and home of Miami’s first medical doctor after the city incorporated in 1896, and preservationists argued the sale would remove one of the few historic structures left in Brickell.

The tower district grew in waves tied to Miami’s booms. Each wave replaced estates and low buildings with taller and denser ones, and the Miami 21 code adopted in 2009 assigned Brickell to the most intense urban zones, which is why the district now holds the city’s thickest cluster of high rises.

The result is a district with several distinct parts. The avenue itself carries the older office and bank towers along the bay. West of it, closer to the elevated Metrorail line, newer residential towers have filled former blocks of low apartment buildings and parking lots. Brickell Key, reached by a short bridge, is a quieter enclave of residential towers and hotels. Mixed use projects with shopping at their base now anchor the district’s center, and the Metromover loop links it to downtown across the river. Each part trades at its own price, and an investor comparing two Brickell units is often comparing two different submarkets.

A financial district

Brickell Avenue became the address for banks and wealth managers serving both local and Latin American clients. When Hurricane Irma struck in 2017, Bloomberg described the avenue as a corridor of wealth managers, banks and luxury hotels³ that turned into a fast moving river, and gave it a label that stuck.

The pandemic years brought a new wave of finance tenants. Bloomberg reported that JPMorgan would double its Brickell offices to 160,000 square feet⁴, making room for 400 more employees. Commercial Observer reported that BNP Paribas leased space in a Brickell tower as yet another sign⁵ of Miami’s emergence as a southern finance center, a trend that took hold as firms left New York. WLRN, drawing on its partner the Miami Herald, reported that leasing at the new 830 Brickell office tower reached at least $100 per square foot⁶, on par with prime Manhattan space, with tenants including Microsoft and Thoma Bravo. The broader relocation wave is covered in the entry on finance firms moving to Miami.

A condo district of investors and renters

Behind the offices, Brickell is above all a residential market, and an unusually investor driven one. Miami Today reported developers’ estimates that investors make up about 90 percent of buyers⁷ of new Brickell condos, mostly Latin Americans seeking long term tenants or short term visitors, and that roughly half the district’s rental supply is now short term. Developers have begun designing buildings specifically for that use.

That buyer base makes the market sensitive to conditions far from Miami. Miami Today reported in mid 2025 that about 1,610 Brickell condos were for sale⁸ while sales slowed, as South American buyers, mostly paying cash, held back amid shifting federal policy. A local broker described the result as a market where inventory was high and sellers were competing with each other for offers.

For an owner who lives in the building, a heavy investor share has practical consequences. Rental units turn over more often, associations spend more on security and wear, and resale prices can fall quickly when investors in one country pull back at the same moment. For a buyer, it means checking a building’s rental rules, its share of units held by investors and its recent sales volume, not only its finishes and views.

New supply keeps coming. Many Brickell towers are sold unit by unit before construction, a model described in the entry on preconstruction condominium sales, and large sites still change hands. Axios reported that the residential company of WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann acquired a building near the river along with three adjacent parcels cleared for more than 1,300 residential units¹⁰, planning a flagship project of more than 1,900 units.

Risks: water, crowding and rules

Brickell’s strengths carry matching risks. Its location on the bay exposes it to storm surge and flooding, as the Bloomberg account of Irma submerging the financial center³ made clear, with water several feet deep near the offices of major banks and cranes collapsing nearby. Coverage premiums and building resilience therefore weigh heavily in any Brickell holding cost, and older towers face the state’s newer condo reserve rules.

Density brings its own frictions. The Miami Herald reported a standing room only meeting of the Brickell Homeowners Association at which residents pressed city and county officials to act against illegal short term vacation rentals⁹ in condo buildings. The tension is structural: a market in which investors buy units to rent to visitors collides with owners who bought homes, and the rules each side wants would change the income a unit can earn. Association bylaws, city zoning and state law each govern part of that question, and a buyer who plans to rent should confirm all three before counting on any rental income.

For buyers, the lesson is that Brickell is several markets layered on one small map: an office market tied to finance, a luxury market tied to foreign capital, a rental market tied to tourism and a resident market tied to daily life. Its value rests on staying both an office address and a home address, and on the city managing the frictions between them.