Condo owners next to Citadel’s planned Miami HQ reject ‘cheapskate’ buyout offers
The Solaris at Brickell Bay is prime Miami real estate. The 22-story condo tower offers waterfront views and sits in the heart of the Brickell financial district.
It also happens to be nestled among a four-acre trio of properties that billionaire Ken Griffin bought for a combined $669 million in 2022 to become the new headquarters for his Chicago-born hedge fund, Citadel, with plans for office space, a hotel, restaurants, retail and residential units at the site.
For more than two years, mysterious LLCs have been buying condos in the 138-unit Solaris building, fueling speculation that Griffin is seeking to take control of the site — though Griffin and a real estate firm tied to the buyers have remained mum about their intentions.
Now, with the LLCs owning at least half of the units but lacking the 80% threshold required under state lawto terminate the condo association and controlthe property, holdout owners are playing hardball.
“They’re chiseling us and being cheapskates,” said Elizabeth Czerny, who owns a unit at Solaris with her husband. “We thought we’d found our forever home here.”
Last week, an attorney representing the unit owners sent a letter to executives at Citadel and Lincoln Property Company, a Dallas-based real estate firm whose representatives are named on the LLCs that have been buying units at Solaris.
The attorney, Glen Waldman, said he represents more than 20% of owners in the building, according to a copy of the letter reviewed by the Miami Herald, and urged Citadel to offer his clients $3,500 per square foot — or $3.5 million for a 1,000-square-foot condo — for their units.
Since December 2022, LLCs tied to Lincoln Property Company have bought units for between $500,000 and $1.1 million from owners who originally purchased their condos for between $200,000 and $450,000, according to Miami-Dade County property records.
One owner sold a 1,064-square-foot unit for $1 million in 2023 after buying it for $315,000 in 2018.
Waldman gave Citadel until Friday to make an offer and said that, otherwise, the group would look to sell the units to a different developer.
“If [the unit owners] are going to have to make a move, they want to make sure they’re compensated appropriately,” Waldman told the Herald. “We can potentially crater any designs they have to terminate this building, and we want to be treated fairly.”
A spokesperson for Citadel declined to comment for this story.Representatives for Lincoln Property Company did not respond to requests for comment.
In interviews this week, members of the holdout group said they are open to selling their units for the right price — but that a lack of transparency and what they perceive as dirty tactics to pressure them to sell has caused stress and put their lives on hold.
After the building opened in 2006 at 186 SE 12th Terrace, many owners bought their units for relatively modest prices in a neighborhood now teeming with new luxury condos and where home values have soared since the pandemic.
Terence Tennant, a former Solaris condo board member and retired attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, bought his two-bedroom, two-bathroom unit with a wraparound balcony for $340,000 in 2021.
“I get a lot of anxiety now because I’m worried about where am I gonna go, how can I find something as nice,” said Tennant, 67. “I love this place, and I don’t want to lose it.”
Like many of his neighbors, Tennant believes Griffin, a philanthropist and Florida’s largest political donor with a reported net worth of $41.8 billion, is behind the buyout effort and will ultimately take over the building.
But that’s not who has been making offers on his condo. Tennant and others have been negotiating with Mario Borda, a Miami real estate broker who represents the LLCs buying up units.
In 2023, Borda sent Tennant a letter offering him $550,000 to purchase his unit. More recently, Tennant said, Borda called him and offered around $1 million.
That offer “starts to make you think,” Tennant said, but itstill wouldn’t be enough for him to move into a comparable unit in Brickell when factoring in taxes and moving costs.
“If I could be given an apartment in Ken Griffin’s new building, I would agree to it,” Tennant said.
The offers have been enticing enough to compel at least half of Solaris owners to sell over the past two years, according to property records. As the pot has sweetened, and as owners were hit with a $2 million assessment last year for pool and garage repairs, the holdout group has lost some of its members.
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But the holdouts say the offers so far are not good enough.
Czerny and her husband,Gil Hall, bought their unit for less than $300,000 in 2018.
“Even $1 million won’t buy us anything around here,” said Hall, a former member of the Solaris condo board. “We can’t replace this place.”
Condo terminations in South Florida have become more common since the state imposed new, expensive requirements for financial reserves and inspections in the wake of the 2021 Surfside condo collapse.
But Hall said he wished that Griffin — or whoever is behind the buyouts — had simply sat down with the Solaris owners in late 2022, when the effort began, to explain his intentions and offer a fair price.
“They could have bought the whole building out two-and-a-half years ago,” Hall said. “It’s just frustrating that they’re playing games and we have no choice in the matter.”
READ MORE: What will happen to South Florida’s skyline? Why condo buyouts are on the rise
As an example of the alleged “game-playing” by the buyers, the holdout group points to public records that list the sale price of some Solaris units at $100 — an apparent effort, they say, to conceal the true price and prevent them from having points of comparison.
Some say Borda has warned them that, if they don’t accept his offers and his buyers are still able to purchase80% of the units, any future offers will be far lower.
“If you buck the system, there will be vengeance,” said Tennant, describing the messaging that he and other owners feel they have received.
Borda did not respond to a request for comment.
The situation has caused tension and distrust in the building, with some of the holdouts believing board members and property managers are cozying up to the buyers.
A property manager and representatives for the condo board did not respond to requests for comment.
In December, two executives at Lincoln Property Company were elected to the five-memberSolaris condo board, leaving them one seat shy of a majority.
Meanwhile, Griffin is pushing ahead with his transformation of the neighborhood. Citadel is looking to break ground in the third quarter of 2025 on its new headquarters, a 54-story glass tower on the empty waterfront lot at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive that sits directly east of Solaris.
“It will not be an iconic building for Miami, it will be an iconic building for the world,” Griffin said at a December conference of the Miami-Dade County League of Cities. “This is our home, this is where we want to stay.”
At the League of Cities conference, Griffin acknowledged that an influx of residents to South Florida has resulted in increased housing costs. He suggested that greater housing supply and the removal of hurdles for developers to obtain permits could help keep prices down.
Tulio, an owner at Solaris who asked to be identified only by his first name, said he took issue with Griffin’s comments. It’s “ironic,” he said, for a billionaire hedge-fund manager to talk about rising housing costs while potentially seeking to replace a “middle-income” building.
“We urge Ken Griffin to be a good neighbor to Solaris residents,” he said. “He’s the one who moved all the way from Chicago to our neighborhood.”
This story was originally published January 23, 2025 at 4:17 PM.
