Lincoln Place, a nearly vacant South Beach office building that was once at the center of a crowdfunding scandal, hit the market with a target price of $82 million, The Real Deal has learned.
The eight-story building at 1601 Washington Avenue in Miami Beach consists of 111,400 square feet of offices; 26,700 square feet of ground-floor retail and a 499-space garage, according to a JLL listing memo. The sale would be of the ground lease that is now owned by New York-based Granite Point Mortgage Trust and runs through 2092, records and the memo show. The city of Miami Beach is the lessor that owns the land.
Hermen Rodriguez and Matthew McCormack are part of the JLL team listing Lincoln Place. They didn’t return requests for comment.
Lincoln Place does not have an official asking price, and the JLL memo does not offer one. But a source said $82 million is the rough target.
The building is 14.8 percent leased, with all of the retail space available and most of the offices available, according to the listing memo.
Completed in 2002 on a 1.5-acre site, Lincoln Place has a storied past that put it at the center of Elie Schwartz’s CrowdStreet fraud scandal of recent years.
New York-based Nightingale Properties, which Schwartz leads as CEO, and Hollywood-based JBL Asset Management paid $80 million for the Lincoln Place ground lease in 2016, according to records. JBL held an 8.7 percent stake.
In May, Schwartz was sentenced to 87 months in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud tied to prosecutors’ allegation he misappropriated about $62.8 million from roughly 800 CrowdStreet investors for his personal use. Most of the funds were meant for an Atlanta office complex purchase and some for Lincoln Place.
In the fall of 2023, Schwartz settled with investors and put the office building under contract to sell to Robert Rivani’s Black Lion and Mathieu Massa’s Massa Investment Group for about $82 million. Schwartz was to pay back investors from the sale.
But last year, Black Lion and Massa Investment pulled out of the deal, casting a shadow on Schwartz’s plan to refund Nightingale investors. Nightingale also was locked in lawsuits with Black Lion and Massa partly over their $2 million deposit. A Miami-Dade County judge in September ordered the funds be returned to an entity tied to Black Lion, court records show. The litigation has since ended.
In February, Granite Point, Nightlingale’s lender on Lincoln Place, took back the ground lease for the building through a lease-in-lieu of foreclosure. Nightingale owed $84.7 million to Granite, including principal, interest and other costs, according to records.
Lincoln Place served as headquarters of Barry Sternlicht’s Starwood Capital from 2016 until 2022 when Starwood moved into its newly built main office on Collins Avenue and 23rd Street.
Miami Beach has grown into an office market, partly due to the influx of out-of-state companies to South Florida during the pandemic. Developers seized on demand, with some starting office projects in South Beach, helping shed its anything-goes party image.
In the South of Fifth neighborhood, Sumaida + Khurana and Bizzi+Bilgili are developing the five-story The Fifth Miami Beach office building at 944 Fifth Street and 411 Michigan Avenue. In the Sunset Harbour area, Deco Capital Group and RWN Real Estate Partners’ completed and fully leased the Eighteen Sunset building at 2759 Purdy Avenue.
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