Tony Arellano and Devlin Marinoff.
Tony Arellano and Devlin Marinoff
Managing partners at DWNTWN Realty Advisors
Tony Arellano and Devlin Marinoff have been key actors in the transformation of Miami neighborhoods such as South Beach, the Design District and Wynwood into the vibrant destinations they are today.
In 2022, the two founders of DWNTWN Realty Advisors brokered the sale of Wynwood Annex, a new office property filled with new-to-market tenants, for $49 million. That was the culmination of the submarket’s growth as a creative urban neighborhood, which the two had been cultivating for years.
When COVID hit and the Florida migration started, DWNTWN began to market Wynwood as an attractive office market to tech firms, venture capitalists and web 3.0 startups — or as Arellano described them, “The type of patrons who go to Panther Coffee or Zach the Baker, versus, you know, Starbucks.”
DWNTWN signed the first deals — with three big Silicon Valley names: Founders Fund, Atomic VC and OpenStore — at the Annex in March 2021, which really got the office wave rolling. The deals were done at $50 to $60 a square foot, a record at the time, but the appetite was enormous and supply was constrained. “We started turning the knob on rental rates because of the enormous demand that we were seeing,” Arellano said.
Of course, the two have watched and participated in Wynwood’s transformation from the beginning — when 16 years ago, Panther Coffee replaced a lot that used to be a gas station. “It was surrounded by shoe stores and functionally obsolete apparel manufacturing buildings,” Arellano said. But soon those warehouses started filling with modeling agencies and architecture firms and media studios.
“One day, I’m driving through Wynwood and I see the double-decker bus and the girls taking pictures, and I said, ‘Holy cow, this is South Beach all over again,’ ” Marinoff recalled.
He immediately called Arellano, who said, “No kidding. I’ve been here for five years already.”
That was 2017. A year later, the two formed DWNTWN Realty Advisors. “Our company is based on the concept of middle markets, emerging urban core,” Arellano said. “Our mantra is ‘Density is our destiny.’ ”
But the work is never over. The next neighborhood on the agenda? Probably Little River, and onward from there. —C.G.
