Banco Santander wants to redevelop its Brickell building with 40-story office tower

Banco Santander proposes to replace its Brickell building with a 40-story office tower, marking at least the fourth planned office project in Miami’s financial district. 

The Spanish bank proposes to demolish its current 14-story office building at 1401 Brickell Avenue and develop a new tower in its place, according to an application filed to the city late last month. The project, called Santander Tower, would have 613,000 square feet of offices and 108,000 square feet for food and beverage space on the ground-floor and atop the ninth-floor podium. 

Banco Santander bought the existing 237,000-square-foot building, completed in 1973 on 2 acres, in 2008 for $114 million, records show. Santander Tower would be much bigger at 1.5 million square feet. 

In 2017, the bank put the building on the market, though a deal never materialized. 

The Miami Urban Development Review Board will review the proposal at its meeting on Wednesday. 

Developers are seizing on the Brickell office market boom with plans for new towers. South Florida became a magnet for out-of-state firms from late 2020 until about late 2022, with Brickell hosting much of the leasing activity. 

Steve Ross’ Related Companies and Swire Properties plan the One Brickell City Centre supertall, which will be nearly 1,000 feet in height and have about 1.4 million square feet of office space. The development firms are working on the demolition of existing buildings on the site at 700 Brickell Avenue and 799 Brickell Avenue. 

Also, the Ardid family’s Key International wants to build a 51-story, 750,000-square-foot office tower at the site of the firm’s current headquarters at 848 Brickell Avenue. The company is partnering with Chicago-based Sterling Bay on the project. 

In the biggest company move to Brickell, billionaire hedge funder Ken Griffin moved his Citadel and Citadel Securities’ headquarters from Chicago to Brickell in 2022. Griffin, who has invested heavily in South Florida’s commercial and residential real estate markets, is expected to develop a new headquarters tower on the bayfront site at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive that he purchased for a record $363 million in 2022. Citadel and Citadel Securities leased temporary space at 830 Brickell and at the Southeast Financial Center at 200 South Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. 

The development proposals come after a decade of no office construction in Brickell. The first standalone building to be completed in the neighborhood in roughly 10 years will be 830 Brickell. Vlad Doronin’s OKO Group and Cain International are nearing completion of the 55-story office tower at 830 Brickell Plaza.