Ken Griffin Finished Buying an Entire Brickell Block for More Than $770 Million

Updated Oct 15, 2026: corrected the building in the Peter Thiel lease, which is 830 Brickell, not 1221 Brickell, and added the stop-work order Miami-Dade issued after the September 14 accident.

Per Bisnow, it took four years and more than $770 million for Ken Griffin to finish assembling a full Brickell city block. The last piece closed when five Miami commissioners agreed to sell Jackson Cottage, described as the city's first doctor's office, in a no-bid sale for $3 million.

The buying started with $360 million in 2022 for the four-acre vacant lot at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive, plus $286.5 million for the office building across the street at 1221 Brickell Ave. Those two purchases alone came to $646.5 million.

The part every older bayfront condo owner should read

Bisnow reports that Griffin purchased all of the condos at the 22-story Solaris building at 1155 Brickell Bay Drive, one by one, concealing his identity until June, per Bisnow's July 28 report, for roughly $125 million. That is a complete private takeout of an occupied condominium tower, executed unit by unit rather than through a bulk termination vote.

If you own in an older bayfront building, this is the template. Holdouts got paid. The buyer stayed anonymous until the assemblage was finished, so nobody negotiating individually knew what the block was ultimately worth.

What gets built

• A $2.5 billion project. Original plans put the tower at 1,032 feet with a rooftop, a 212-key hotel and 1.3 million square feet of office.
• Office space expanded to 1.7 million square feet. Citadel plans to take about 560,000 square feet of it.
• Residential and parking. A 300-unit apartment building and a garage with more than 1,400 spaces.
• Work had started. Soil-mixing was underway to prepare for vertical construction by the end of this year, until the accident below stopped work.
• An accident at the site. On September 14 an 85-foot drilling rig collapsed onto Brickell Bay Drive at the project. Four people were hospitalized in stable condition and OSHA is investigating, per CBS News Miami. Miami-Dade issued a stop-work order that morning and wants a safety plan from the contractor before work resumes, per Bisnow. As of October 15 I have found no report that it has been lifted (more on the order).

Two Brickell office data points came out of the same reporting. 830 Brickell, where Citadel set up its temporary headquarters, is fully leased, with Peter Thiel's family office paying $250 per square foot last month for 18,000 square feet on the 44th floor. And new-to-market activity fell from as much as 21% of office activity in 2021 to 9% in 2026, which says the growth is now coming from tenants already here.

My read

The Solaris deal is the most useful thing here for a normal owner. It proves a full-building takeout is achievable in Brickell right now, and that an individual seller who waits can get paid. It also proves you can be negotiating against a counterparty whose identity and intentions you do not know. If someone approaches you about your unit in an older bayfront building, find out who is behind the LLC before you name a price. What is unresolved: the per-unit prices paid to Solaris owners were not disclosed, there is no delivery date, and I cannot confirm the 1,032-foot height survived the redesign that expanded the office component. The same report notes the county needs more than 90,000 units for residents earning about $75,000 a year.