Finance Firms Moving to Miami
Contents
Trevor L Taylor, a Miami private investor and the founder of Fortius Capital, works in a city whose finance industry changed shape quickly. His firm is a private investment vehicle. The wider story of this entry is about the large investment managers and banks that opened or moved offices to Miami, and about what that shift did to the office market, the job mix and the reputation of the Brickell financial district.
The trigger
The relocation wave began as a pandemic story. When lockdowns emptied offices in the Northeast and on the West Coast, many executives spent months working from South Florida, and some of them stayed. Commercial Observer described Apollo’s Brickell lease as part of a trend of financial firms opening offices in South Florida1 after those lockdowns. A spokesperson quoted in that report said the firm wanted its office footprint where talent already lived or wanted to live.
Bloomberg reporting syndicated by WealthManagement.com added the household side of the move. Wealthy Northeasterners and Californians had long been drawn to Miami for its weather and lower taxes, and the pandemic sped that up; families who bought homes as lockdown retreats became permanent residents2, enrolled children in local schools and built social networks. Offices followed the people. Starwood Capital finished a new headquarters in Miami Beach, and Amazon placed roughly 100 employees in a shared workspace in nearby Coral Gables, according to the same report. The tax side of that story is covered in the entry on Florida and the state income tax.
Brickell leases and record rents
The clearest measure of the shift was rent. Apollo took an entire floor at 701 Brickell, bringing the Class A tower to 96 percent leased at an asking rent of $80 a square foot, according to the Commercial Observer report1. A few months later WLRN reported that leasing at 830 Brickell, then still under construction, had reached at least $100 a square foot3, a Miami record that put the building on par with prime space in Lower Manhattan. Tenants signing there included Microsoft, the private equity group Thoma Bravo and the Canadian investment group CI Financial.
Demand did not stay in the core. The same Bloomberg piece noted that leasing was spreading from Downtown and Brickell into residential neighborhoods such as Coconut Grove and into Miami Beach, at a time when offices in San Francisco and New York were emptying. A Cushman and Wakefield broker quoted there described big firms pulling in smaller ones that wanted to serve them. Foreign banks joined too. BNP Paribas leased part of a floor at 801 Brickell for nearly 50 staff from its global markets business, saying many clients had also migrated4 to Miami and Palm Beach. The bank had run a Miami wealth management office about a decade earlier, and asking rents in its new building ranged from $85 to $110 a square foot, which shows how far pricing had moved in a short time.
The Citadel headquarters
The move that gave the trend its nickname came from Chicago. In a memo to staff, Ken Griffin said Citadel and Citadel Securities would establish new headquarters in Miami5, with a new tower to be built on Brickell Bay and a few hundred employees expected in leased space in the meantime. Fortune noted that the two firms then had more than 1,000 employees in Illinois.
Bloomberg framed the plan as a long bet on the city, picturing programmers and portfolio staff filling Brickell6 alongside lawyers and accountants following the money to a lasting Wall Street South. Large banks kept expanding afterward. JPMorgan said it would double its Brickell offices to 160,000 square feet7, room for about 400 more employees, as part of a push into South Florida wealth.
Other managers made similar choices without building towers. Miami Today reported that Blackstone relocated staff to a downtown lease of about 41,000 square feet and pledged close to $25 million to bring technology jobs to the city, while Millennium advertised engineering roles for its Miami teams. A Beacon Council official told the paper he expected Citadel to grow to more than 1,000 employees in the Brickell area over time.
The jobs that came with the firms
The new offices did not bring only traders. A Beacon Council executive told Miami Today that relocated investment funds were increasingly quantitative and highly technical8, so staffing tilted toward engineers and data roles, with traditional support jobs around them. That overlap is one reason the finance story and the Miami technology sector are hard to separate, and it connects to the growth of family offices in Miami.
The county’s economic development agency puts the scale plainly. More than 60 international banks operate in Brickell, and the finance sector employs more than 150,000 people9 and adds about $27.7 billion a year in economic output. The agency ties that role to Miami’s position between North and Latin America, a theme developed in the entry on Miami as a gateway to Latin America.
Limits of the label
Not everyone accepted the hype. In an early CNBC report, a Cornell professor who studies the migration of wealthy Americans pointed out that New York drew several times more venture money than Florida, and the piece listed low wages, inequality and a housing shortage10 as obstacles. The office market in Miami Dade also remained small compared with older financial centers, as the Bloomberg report noted, so a handful of leases could move averages sharply. Miami Dade had just over 46 million square feet of office space at the time, a fraction of the inventory in Manhattan or Chicago, which means a single large tenant can tighten the whole market.
For a local investor, the practical lessons are concrete. Rents, labor costs and housing all respond to a few large tenants, and a relocation wave lifts some assets while squeezing others. The Brickell neighborhood now carries the cost and the prestige of that shift. Whether the finance relocation wave proves durable depends less on the next famous name than on whether the firms already here keep hiring once their headline names stop arriving.
