Starwood Capital Group received the temporary certificate of occupancy for its new 144,430-square-foot headquarters at 2340 Collins Ave. in Miami Beach, the project’s co-developer confirmed. With the building substantially completed, that means the investment firm’s employees can begin moving in.
Victor Ballestas, a principal at Miami-based Integra Investments, said the building won its TCO from the city of Miami Beach’s building department Dec. 30.
“We were pushing hard to get it by the end of the year so Starwood can get in there right away and they are in the process of doing so already,” Ballestas told the Business Journal.
The company won’t have far to move. Starwood Capital Group, an investment firm with $100 billion in assets and 4,000 people in 16 offices worldwide, has had its headquarters located in 1601 Washington Ave. in South Beach since around 2016. Its headquarters was in Connecticut before that.
Barry Sternlicht, CEO of Starwood Capital Group and its publicly traded mortgage investment company, Starwood Property Trust (NYSE: STWD), is a Miami Beach resident.
Starwood’s new headquarters was built on a 28,500-square-foot parking lot that a limited liability connected to Starwood bought for $5 million in 2012. It’s near 1 Hotel South Beach, which Starwood and the LeFrak Organization built in 2015. The office building was financed with a $76.2 million construction loan Starwood took out in April 2020.
Three hundred of Starwood’s employees will occupy 55% of the office space. The rest will be leased out to other companies, approved by Sternlicht. The gross rental rates for these third parties are roughly between $90 and $100 a square foot, Ballestas said.
Aside from office space, the new Starwood building has 8,000 square feet of retail, a 277-space parking garage, and outdoor wood-clad cabanas on each floor.
The opening of Starwood Headquarters comes during a period when Miami Beach officials and developers are considering ways of increasing its stock of Class A office in an effort to diversify the city’s economy beyond tourism and nightlife.
Those efforts include increasing the height limits for Class A office space on segments of Alton Road and within the Sunset Harbour overlay district in South Beach. Miami Beach has also issued a request for proposals for developers interested in building offices on three city-owned parking lots, and/or redeveloping the 17th Street garage into a Class A office complex. Starwood and Integra are submitting bids for all four sites, Ballestas said.
Ballestas, a former Starwood employee, pointed out that the Starwood headquarters is the first Class A office building that has been constructed in Miami Beach in nearly two decades.
“It is just a different quality of building,” Ballestas said.
The new Starwood building is owned by the Starwood Capital Group. Ballestas said Integra Investments was hired by Starwood as a co-developer due to his early involvement in the project as a Starwood employee (he helped pick the site) and the company’s experience in the South Florida area.
