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The financial sector, which has been consistently growing over the past few years, is attracting new-to-market firms to various Miami area locales, including Brickell and Wynwood, as current negotiations will increase its employment numbers in the upcoming months.
Stephen Rutchik, executive managing director of office services at Colliers, said Brickell “is a familiar, international address that the financial firms tend to gravitate to, and as a result, that’s where we’ve seen the majority of the activity.”
However, he added, there are substantial activity from financial firms setting up in Wynwood. “The slight difference within the financial sector,” he said, “is that we’re finding that a good number of tenants in Wynwood are in the cryptocurrency space.”
According to preliminary data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in the sector of financial activities in Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall Metropolitan Division rose from 80,400 in November 2020 to 86,000 in November 2021, a 7% increase. The economic summary of the Miami area employment data, updated in February, showed 193,800 jobs related to financial activities as of December.
This data includes real estate activity in the financial industry, said Jaap Donath, senior vice president of research and strategic planning of the Beacon Council. The financial service job count is about 56,000 employees in banking-related jobs, he said.
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“Miami and South Florida has historically been a center for international banking for decades, we’ve been the financial capital of Latin America, and we’ve been actively growing on that base for the last decade and creating business out of New York [firms],” said James Kohnstamm, executive vice president of economic development for the Beacon Council. “We started that trend pre-covid, but then, in the last few years it has just accelerated.”
Major financial institutions such as JP Morgan Chase contributed to the local economy with around 2,480 employees in the tri-county area in 2016, according to its website. Blackstone aimed to hire 200 professionals last summer for its 41,000-square-foot lease at 2 MiamiCentral in downtown Miami. Companies such as Millennium Management, which has leased 74,000 square feet of offices in Brickell’s Sabadell Financial Center, and Apollo, which has steadily grown in the past year – adding $1 billion in assets in 2021 – represent hundreds of new jobs in the financial sector, said Mr. Kohnstamm. “Some of those people have already relocated during Covid-19; some of them are local talent who have graduated from local universities.”
At 801 Brickell, said Mr. Rutchik, “we’ve had a number of leases for new-to-market tenants, the majority of them are financial firms. At 800 Brickell, across the street, we’re negotiating with two financial firms who would be taking up immediate presence.”
Miami Beach and Coconut Grove are also submarkets with great interest from financial firms in the wealth management division to open new offices, Mr. Rutchik said. “Based on the early negotiations, which generally would be signed in three, six or nine months from now and before they’re announced, I would say we’re going to continue to see this growth accelerate.”
It’s a snowball effect, he said, from the initial drivers that led to this growth. “They’re all part of the same story, which is the net migration of people and companies to South Florida, and it is becoming a mandatory dot on the map as a destination for finance.”
“All the companies on their way [to Miami] are creating that job growth in the upcoming years,” said Mr. Donath. “And most companies want to hire locally because they know that folks who are in the community know the community. And that’s why it’s important to have education institutions focus on these industries to make sure that we have the skill sets to be successful.”
https://www.miamitodaynews.com/2022/03/15/new-york-outflow-spurs-financial-jobs-growth/
