He did not say yes. He did not say no. He just stepped around it.
In a Wynwood office on a Thursday morning, brokers from Goldman Properties and a representative from Citadel met with Moishe Mana’s team in a conference room that looks out on a blank stretch of 24th Street. A rumor had been moving through Miami’s commercial corridors for weeks that Citadel’s Ken Griffin would buy Mana Wynwood’s 30-acre campus at 318 Northwest 23rd Street for roughly $700 million and convert it to a corporate hub. The Mana side had materialized with prepared data packages and comparables. Goldman had a spreadsheet of tenant rosters and lease expirations. Citadel’s representative listened without interrupting as the numbers were read out loud. In real time, a deal that had been reported on social media and in market chatter was both the premise of the meeting and the thing that no one addressed head-on.
Minutes in, someone paused mid-sentence and glanced at the phone on the table. A text came through. It was a rebuttal to the rumor that had brought them there: both Mana and Citadel had publicly denied being in talks over that sale. Silence followed. Phones stayed face up. No one reached for coffee. Samson, the Goldman Properties negotiator, took out a pen, made a tiny mark on his notepad, then set it down. A stack of contracts sat untouched in front of Moishe Mana’s lawyer. The meeting pressed on anyway.
Wynwood has been a locus for investment that slips between expectation and execution. Citadel did in fact pair with Goldman to buy the 545Wyn office building for about $180 million in mid-January, a transaction that closed while the rumor swirled. The property, once controlled by Sterling Bay, now anchors a small cluster of office space that has tenants like Sony Music Group and PwC under lease.
In the room there was a moment when someone asked, almost reflexively, about timing. “We are referring back to operations teams,” said the Citadel rep. Nobody said anything. An assistant adjusted the blinds. The blinds did not move any light they were supposed to block out. An expectation that the $700 million rumor might resolve into something actionable collapsed without a statement. No alternative proposal was tabled. Mana pushed a brochure toward the Citadel side before retracting his hand. The brochure stayed in place.
The economic stage in Miami has not softened but it has shifted. Major office proposals that framed years of projections have been delayed or cancelled. Swire Properties’ plan for One Brickell City Centre, which would have been among the tallest structures in Miami at 700 Brickell Avenue, was formally stopped in early 2025 after months without ground-breaking activity. Offices once thought core to future land use are now things to reconsider or convert. In Wynwood similar patterns play out where speculative capital hesitates and then recalibrates.
Someone eventually said they would take the questions offline. It meant nothing in that moment. The Mana convention center remains open and the rumor has been publicly disavowed. Mana repeated that if something real were in place it would have been announced. Citadel echoed the same language.
Nobody in the room asked why the 545Wyn deal moved forward while the bigger transaction did not. There was no negotiated counteroffer for the Mana land. Someone cleared his throat twice, then stopped talking altogether. Time passed with quiet agreement that they would talk again but on another day, another file. No calendars were opened. The whiteboard markers remained uncapped but unused.
Outside, Wynwood Plaza over on North Miami Avenue is still under construction. Brokers talk about an e-commerce tenant that might take up to 80,000 square feet there, but that too is listed as “in advanced negotiations” without a signed lease.
When the men and women left the conference room that morning they split up at the elevator bank without a plan to regroup. A rumor had brought them together. A public denial kept them from concluding anything of substance. The only concrete outcome was that the 545Wyn building was now Citadel’s, and Mana’s campus remained open for business without a new owner.
Two blocks away, a tenant at 545Wyn stepped out of an Uber and walked straight past an art mural that reads like a faded investment pitch. He did not stop. There was no story in it anymore. The car pulled away and the street returned to what it had been before the rumor took hold.
A silence settled. That was the closest anyone came to a decision.