The Hollo family with 1201 Brickell Bay Drive (Google Maps)
A waterfront development site in Miami’s Brickell traded for a record price of $363 million.
An affiliate of Florida East Coast Realty, led by Tibor Hollo and his family, sold the empty lot at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive to a Delaware company.
A Florida LLC with the same name as the buyer was created this month and is managed by Randall Davis with a Chicago address. It’s unclear if the buyer is Randall Davis, the prominent Houston developer who leads Randall Davis Company. The firm did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The 2.5 acre property sold for $3,340 per square foot, or about $145 million per acre.
The site was long planned to be a major development with two supertall towers. Florida East Coast Realty, Corigin Real Estate Group and Frank McCourt’s McCourt Global Properties planned a 1,049-foot-tall two-building project designed by British architect Norman Foster’s Foster + Partners.
Jerome Hollo, executive vice president at the Miami-based development firm, declined to comment. Corigin and McCourt did not respond to requests for comment.
An affiliate of Florida East Coast Realty paid $15.5 million for the property in 2000, records show.
The Towers by Foster + Partners was expected to include 660 residential units that would likely have been built as condos, as well as underground parking and a podium that connected the two skyscrapers.
The project was in the running for the tallest buildings along the Eastern Seaboard south of New York City. As it stands, Florida East Coast Realty’s nearby Panorama Tower is the tallest at 826 feet tall, though other high-rises are in the works that would surpass that.
The latest purchase beats the previous record price for land, set in 2011, when Genting Group paid $236 million for the 14-acre site that was the longtime home of the Miami Herald in downtown Miami’s Arts & Entertainment District, according to sources. That property has not yet been redeveloped, as Genting has aggressively sought gambling on the site,
Development sites have been trading for record prices, as out-of-state developers flock to South Florida. In Miami’s urban core, which includes Brickell, 56 properties traded for over $1 billion in 2020 and 2021, according to Real Capital Analytics data previously provided by Colliers International South Florida.
A number of new residential projects are planned in Brickell. Mast Capital paid $103 million for the land at 1420 South Miami Avenue in December, and plans to build two towers on the 2.8-acre property. One will be a Cipriani-branded luxury condo high-rise.
The Related Group and Integra Investments recently launched sales of a pair of luxury St. Regis-branded condo towers on a waterfront site in Brickell.
Property Markets Group is proposing a pair of residential towers with about 800 units between Southwest Eight and Ninth streets and west of Southwest First Avenue and the Metromover tracks, according to an application filed with Miami-Dade County last month.
Other pricey waterfront land sales in Miami’s history include the Coto family’s $125 million purchase of the site of Aston Martin Residences, which is nearing completion at 300 Biscayne Boulevard Way. A partnership between developers Ugo Colombo and Diego Lowenstein sold the 1.3-acre parcel in 2014.
