Record deal: Monarch, Tourmaline buying 801 Brickell for roughly $250M

Monarch Alternative Capital and Tourmaline Capital Partners are buying the 801 Brickell office tower in Miami for about $250 million, The Real Deal has learned. 

If the deal closes at this price, it would mark a record for a South Florida office investment this year.

Monarch and Tourmaline are buying the 28-story building at 801 Brickell Avenue in Miami from Nuveen Real Estate, according to sources, who put the price in the mid-$200 million range. The deal is expected to close late this week or early next week. 

Adam Spies and Marcella Fasulo of Newmark, along with Mike Davis and Dominic Montazemi of Cushman & Wakefield are representing the seller.

Spies and Montazemi declined comment, and Davis didn’t return a request for comment. 

Completed in 1984, the building spans 695,000 square feet with roughly 415,000 square feet of that being offices, property records show. Nuveen, which is the investment arm of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America, or TIAA, had paid $80.3 million for the building in 2002. 

801 Brickell is over 90 percent leased, sources said. 

Tenants include investment firm Selvatra, Cassel Salpeter bank and Swiss Re AGroup. BNP Paribas Securities Corporation, a subsidiary of European bank BNP Paribas, signed a seven-year lease this year and is expected to open the 7,000-square-foot office in the fourth quarter. Last year, Nuveen moved its Southeast headquarters to the building. 

Groot Hospitality’s Komodo restaurant has an outpost at 801 Brickell. 

The deal comes amid a slowdown of investment sales over the past year due to pricey financing driven by high interest rates. Firms still buying offices are either going in with enough equity, allowing them to bypass taking out a loan, or are seeking more favorable mortgage terms. 

801 Brickell’s buyers are financing roughly 60 percent of the purchase price, sources told TRD. 

The Brickell Financial District has remained somewhat resilient to the woes plaguing office markets elsewhere in the U.S. The neighborhood became a magnet for the new-to-market firms that homed in on South Florida from late 2020 to mid-last year. 

Financial firms that have leased in Brickell in recent years include Apollo Capital Management, Canadian asset manager CI Financial and private equity firm Thoma Bravo. Billionaire Ken Griffin also moved his Citadel and Citadel Securities’ headquarters to Brickell from Chicago. 

Monarch and Tourmaline’s purchase is the largest South Florida office deal since Griffin’s $286.5 million purchase of the building at 1221 Brickell Avenue in the summer of last year. 

The influx of tenants has pushed up Brickell rents to new highs, with some asking rates topping $100 per square foot. The 801 Brickell deal is partly a wager on rental growth at the tower, as new deals are signing for over $100 a foot, much more than than the rates for in-place leases, sources said. 

Monarch, an $11.7 billion global investment firm, has offices in New York, London and West Palm Beach, according to its website. The firm is led by Michael Weinstock. 

Tourmaline is an office investor founded in 2021 that has made $3 billion of purchases and has 1.4 million square feet under development, its website says. It’s led by Brandon Huffman. 

Monarch and Tourmaline also have ownership stakes in the Citigroup Center at 201 South Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. CP Group, previously called Crocker Partners, also is a part owner of the 34-story tower. 

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