Jeff Bezos has made Miami his home, and now his corporate giant is doing the same.
On November 2, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, Jeff Bezos, announced his plans to relocate from Seattle to Miami.
Amazon has confirmed it is searching for 50K SF of office space in the city. This comes as Bezos buys mansions near Miami Beach ahead of a planned move to South Florida.
Amazon has over 400 corporate and tech employees working in the Miami area. However, the company has no permanent offices and operates out of serviced office spaces. According to a spokesperson, Amazon plans to sign a lease for a permanent office in the region after experiencing years of organic growth.
Amazon is currently looking for office space in a market that has proven to be resilient amidst a nationwide slowdown in leasing. Even though the pandemic-induced wave of relocations and expansions to Miami has slowed, the total availability of office space is at 21%, which is 80 basis points lower than the 2019 levels, according to CBRE’s third-quarter report.
Amazon is searching for a space of 50,000 square feet, much larger than the average of 20,000 square feet for new-to-market leases since 2022. CBRE said this would be one of the most significant new leases signed this year. However, a limited pool of high-quality space is available in the market, even with a 2.4 million square feet development pipeline. The third-quarter report states that any upper-echelon space will unlikely remain on the market.
According to a spokesperson who spoke to Bloomberg, the search for office space began before Bezos announced his move from Seattle to Miami on Nov. 2.
Jeff Bezos, who resigned as the CEO of Amazon in 2021 and took on the role of executive chairman, has announced in a recent post that he is moving to Miami to be closer to his parents, who also recently relocated to the city. He also mentioned that his space exploration company, Blue Origin, has been relocating its operations to Cape Canaveral, approximately 200 miles north of Miami.
Amazon’s founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, has recently made a significant real estate investment. He spent a total of $147 million on two properties located on Indian Creek, a private island near Miami Beach that’s also called the Billionaire Bunker. In June, he first purchased a three-bedroom home on 2.8 acres for $68 million. He spent another $79 million in October to get the adjacent seven-bedroom mansion on 1.8 acres.
According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Bezos, whose fortune is worth $172B, is the second-wealthiest person in the world. He will be the next member of the world’s ultrarich to relocate to Miami.
Ken Griffin, ranked the 36th wealthiest person in the world, relocated his hedge fund Citadel to Miami last year. He has since been acquiring homes in Coconut Grove and West Palm Beach. The Real Deal, a publication covering real estate news, reported that Eric Schmidt, one of the founders of Google and ranked 54th on the billionaire index, purchased two houses on Sunset Island in Miami Beach for $63 million in September.
According to the South Florida Business Journal, Miami-Dade County attracted $7.4B in income inflow in 2022, making it the top county in Florida for wealth migration, followed by Palm Beach County with $7.2B.
South Florida’s two counties contributed 37% of the $39.2B that flowed into the state last year.
