In Miami, Brickell’s New York-Size Office Rents Drive Suburban Growth

In a place like Miami, where sea levels are cresting as quickly as one inch every three years, a rising tide can’t help but lift all boats — and the same is true for office rents.

After Miami’s luxury 830 Brickell blew area standards for office rent out of the water, growing in the last few years from local highs of around $60 per square foot in 2021 to the area’s all-time record of $225 a foot today, Class A office footprints throughout Miami’s central business district (CBD) and the surrounding areas are now reaping the benefits of the new benchmark.

“Since 2021, Brickell Class A rents have grown 74 percent to [an average of] $102 per square foot while over the same time, the CBD overall has soared 53 percent to $76.24,” according to a CBRE report for the fourth quarter of 2025. “Growth in the CBD has ignited overall asking rates in the suburban market up 1,100 basis points year-over-year to $56.89 per square foot, and Class A suburban rates to rise 1,200 basis points year-over-year to $66.23.”

While 830 Brickell still stands alone in the $200-a-foot zone, the fact that Class A office rents marketwide have taken a massive leap is no surprise to those who were active in the area by the time the pandemic hit.

“For years, my partners and I discussed, ‘Why aren’t there more businesses moving here? Why aren’t there more influential people moving here?’ ” said Andrew Trench, executive managing director at Cushman & Wakefield. “There’s such great quality of life and all these tax benefits here. And, at that time, real estate wasn’t very expensive.”

The pandemic lit the fuse on those changes, causing a personal and corporate influx that snowballed from the summer of 2020 and turned into a movement.

“A lot of wealthy individuals got out of their dense cities, New York and Chicago, for what they thought was maybe a couple weeks while this COVID thing blew over,” said Trench. “Obviously, it lasted longer, and, in being part of this force experiment in South Florida, they realized there’s this great quality of life here, plus great tax benefits and so on. That’s when people started taking it seriously.”

The influx of companies that were used to paying high Manhattan rents helped make it easier to quickly raise rents on Class A and trophy product, especially at 830 Brickell, which was the only new trophy product in the market at the time.

But, while other Miami office buildings can’t justify rates over $200 a foot, many have found a healthy upward trajectory nonetheless.

Trench said that C&W took over leasing for nearby 701 Brickell around seven years ago, and did its first office deal there at $65 a square foot, which was $10 higher than the previous high. Today, the top space in the building goes for $150 per square foot.

Zander El-Hindi, a senior manager for Florida research at JLL, notes that as Brickell increasingly becomes known for trophy properties, with more Class A-plus office buildings delivering over the next few years, some of the surrounding neighborhoods will be well positioned to become Class A or A-minus strongholds.

“Not everybody can pay these Brickell rates,” said El-Hindi. “A lot of our high-credit tenants — like big banks, big tech or big law firms — can go into those spaces with no problem and have their presence in Brickell, which is what they want. Tenants that are smaller, more boutique or more regional that can’t afford those prices will look at alternatives like Coral Gables. That’s a submarket that can provide them with all the amenities Brickell has. It can provide the walkability, and, for a lot of decision-makers and people who made the big migration, it’s easier to get home from there due to traffic patterns.”

Trench said that given the rapid escalation of rents in Brickell, some longtime tenants are shocked to learn they might need to move into other submarkets when it’s time to renew.

“A lot of tenants in Brickell coming into 2020 were under leases that were probably $40 or $50 a square foot,” said Trench. “Those spaces are now coming up for renewal, and there are tenants getting renewal proposals for $120 or $130 a square foot, which makes some question, ‘Do I really need to be in the central business district anymore?’ ”

This migration within Miami is having the dual effect of sending more companies into offices in submarkets such as Coral Gables in search of cheaper rents, while at the same time driving up those rents.

“Coral Gables has benefited the most because it’s not a new market that people are guessing about,” said Trench. “It’s an established market with Class A buildings. They’re not the high-rises of Brickell, but nice Class A buildings near great restaurants, with safety and walkability, that are closer to home for anyone who lives south of downtown. There is a new building in Coral Gables called 4225 Ponce where we did a deal at $90 a square foot.”

While Trench cites that last deal as a bit of an outlier — standard Class A rents in Coral Gables currently go for around $70 or $80 a foot, he said — he also said he would “not be shocked if Class A Coral Gables becomes a $100-per-square-foot market not too far from now.”

Eric Messer, director of research for Florida and Texas for Cushman & Wakefield, confirmed that Class A office rents in Coral Gables saw a year-over-year increase of 11.1 percent, eclipsing the 10.2 percent rate of increase for the wider Miami-area market. 

Declan Hood, senior market intelligence analyst at Avison Young, noted that in addition to Coral Gables, some companies that might have previously made Brickell their first stop on an office search are also looking at less pricey (but also rising) markets like Coconut Grove or Miami Beach.

The increase in interest in these submarkets is strongly reflected in rising office rents. At the end of 2022, according to Avison Young, Coconut Grove had an average asking rent of $54.83 a foot, Coral Gables was at $47.84, and Miami Beach offices rented for $71.28. In the three years since, those averages have risen to $88.50, $60.58 and $98.61, respectively.

These trajectories are now not too dissimilar from Brickell’s, where average office rents rose over the three years from $78.35 to $99.31, an indication of Class A dominance in the submarket.

“That rate of almost $100 per square foot is really representative of the blended rate for the whole market,” said Steven Hurwitz, who leads agency leasing for JLL in Miami. “That really speaks to the trends, because it includes the entirety of the Brickell submarket — it includes the comp set of all the properties we track, including Class B. If you look at the trend line, it’s up 40 or 50 percent over the last couple years.”

That said, it’s little surprise to learn that the majority of leasing in the Miami market overall occurred in the top half, with 60 percent of the 3.8 million square feet of office space leased in Miami in 2025 occurring in Class A spaces, according to Avison Young — a 6 percent increase over 2024. That share of leasing activity seems poised to grow with the delivery of new Class A and trophy product.

The Brickell submarket is looking ahead to the arrival of a number of trophy office properties that are currently in various stages of planning or construction. Those include the 51-story, 750,000-square-foot 848 Brickell, which is expected to open in April 2028; the 1.6 million-square-foot, mixed-use Santander Tower at 1401 Brickell, also expected to deliver in 2028; and the mixed-use, supertall global headquarters for financial firm Citadel at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive, which is scheduled to include 1.485 million square feet of office space and which will be the tallest office building in Florida at 54 stories and 1,028 feet. It is unclear when that project will open. Groundbreaking is currently expected sometime this year.

The market’s Class A expansion will hardly be restricted to Brickell, either. For 2026, CBRE notes that there are “approximately 600,000 square feet of product across six suburban market projects,” with 250,000 square feet of that coming from two separate projects in Miami Beach.

When examining the strength of Miami’s office market, it’s worth noting that Miami has one of the highest office utilization rates in the nation. Comparing November 2025 utilization to November 2019, the city’s 74.4 percent beat Manhattan, which stood at 74.1 percent, and Washington, D.C., at 70.5 percent. The figure for the nation as a whole was 62 percent.

And, while 2025’s total office building sales volume of $982 million for Miami marked a slight decline, according to Avison Young, overall transaction activity rose “sharply,” reaching its highest level since 2021 and indicating “increasing investor confidence across the Miami office market, regardless of asset class or transaction size,” the company said.     

Miami-Dade County also saw positive absorption for the year of 126,408 square feet, though 327,186 of that was for trophy properties — both Class A and Class B offices ended the year with negative absorption totals. Absorption of new space in Miami was a negative 99,330 square feet in the fourth quarter, too, according to Newmark, but this was due in part to the delivery of the Fifth, an office building at 950 Fifth Avenue at the southern tip of Miami Beach that added 70,000 square feet of office space to the submarket. In total, 336,000 square feet of new product was delivered to Miami in 2025.

As such, JLL’s year-end report noted that Miami’s overall vacancy rate was 16 percent, up only 20 basis points year-over-year, but that “a significant portion of this vacancy remains driven by new deliveries that have been pre-leased but are still finalizing build-outs.”

According to C&W’s Trench, one interesting shift in the market that could account for greater absorption moving forward is that the average office footprint is growing.

“Tenants have gotten larger in Miami. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case in every city in the country, but a result of new businesses moving down here,” said Trench. “For forever, we’ve been a 5,000-square-foot tenant market, on average. Before 2020, we probably had ten 100,000-square-foot tenants. That doesn’t even fill up one building in Manhattan. Since then, I would say we’ve at least doubled the amount of six-
figure tenants we have, and we’re doing much more 20,000- to 50,000-square-foot deals than we used to.”

Speaking to experts throughout the market, it’s clear that expectations for the performance of new product are high, and will continue to bode well for an office market where rents seemingly have nowhere to go but up.

“Vacancies will rise when these buildings are being delivered, but the demand is there for these buildings. We’ll definitely see them fill up,” said Alain Perez, senior research analyst for Newmark. “There’s strong demand and strong rent growth across the market, and I think we’ll continue to see that going forward, especially as the population is projected to increase due to migration. We’re going to see stronger growth in the coming market.”

Larry Getlen can be reached at lgetlen@commercialobserver.com.