Ken Griffin Completes Brickell Block Assembly for $2.5B Citadel HQ
The Solaris buyout was only part of the bill. The full block, cottage included, ran $770 million before ground breaks.
Ken Griffin’s Brickell block assembly is done. Miami commissioners approved his purchase of a 121-year-old, city-owned cottage on the site in mid-July, closing out a four-year, roughly $770 million campaign that also swallowed the entire 138-unit Solaris condo tower and a 4-acre vacant lot, according to Bisnow. Site work has already started: Citadel began soil-mixing on the block to prepare for vertical construction before the end of 2026.
Why it matters
This is the finish line on a story The American Developer has tracked since the Solaris buyout surfaced. Our July 17 piece covered Griffin’s $2.98 million bid for the cottage, the last holdout parcel. That vote has now passed, and Bisnow’s reporting fills in the full scope for the first time: Griffin paid $360 million for the vacant lot in 2022, $286.5 million for an office building across the street, and about $125 million to buy out Solaris unit by unit, all funneling into a planned $2.5 billion campus. The $770 million spent on land and buildings alone would buy roughly 1,619 typical South Florida homes at the metro’s $475,622 median value, a rough measure of what a full Brickell block now costs a buyer who refuses to be told no by a single owner.
The numbers
Griffin bought all 138 Solaris units plus the ground-floor retail over roughly three years using anonymous LLCs, spending about $125 million, according to Bloomberg’s July 2 investigation. Robb Report puts the average sale price at $875 per square foot, about 21% above the roughly $618 per square foot fetched by the nearby Club at Brickell Bay. The first unit sold in December 2022 for just over $500,000, Robb Report reported; the last holdouts got seven-figure exits as word spread that a single buyer was assembling the tower. The planned campus now totals 1.7 million square feet of office space, of which Citadel will occupy about 560,000 square feet, plus a 300-unit apartment building and 1,400 parking spaces. A previously floated 212-key hotel has been dropped from the plan, per Bisnow.
What’s next
Demolition of the Solaris tower is expected to begin soon now that the cottage sale has cleared, with vertical construction targeted to start by the end of 2026. For developers watching South Florida, Griffin’s four-year, nine-figure assembly is a data point on how much site control now costs in Brickell when a single buyer wants an entire block and is willing to outlast every seller on it.