Guggenheim honcho is Miami’s newest bigwig. He’ll live in the city’s biggest condo

Scott Minerd, the chief investment officer and founding managing partner at Guggenheim Partners, the California-based investment firm with more than $310 billion in assets, is joining the Miami relocation craze.

Minerd has paid $12.5 million for two penthouses at Biscayne Beach, a 51-story luxury condo tower in Edgewater. The combined penthouses will take up an entire floor in the building according to Forbes, which was first to report the story.

The two combined units will stretch out over 22,547 square feet of living space, with 11 bedrooms, two swimming pools and private elevator access, according to Forbes.

Jonathan Miller, CEO of Miller Samuel, a real estate firm based in New York, said the unit will be the largest condo ever sold in Miami-Dade County by square feet.

“In the last seven years, there have only been five sales larger than 10,000 square feet, so this is highly unusual,” Miller said. “Maybe a developer has kept a larger unit for themselves. But when you get to this size, it’s an extremely rarified sales market.”

According to Miller, the second-largest condo unit sold in Miami-Dade is a 19,403-square-foot unit at the Porsche Design Tower.

Minerd is the latest high-profile corporate bigwig to relocate to Miami. Wall Street tycoon Carl Icahn relocated his entire firm, Icahn Investments, to South Florida in 2019. Other recent transplants include Melvin Capital’s Gabriel Plotkin, a co-founder of the pet store Chewy. Blackstone Group and Goldman Sachs are also relocating big chunks of their companies to South Florida.

Minerd will keep his mansion in Santa Monica, California, where Guggenheim Partners is based, but plans to become a Florida resident, which would require him to spend six months of the year living here.

“Zoom is here for the rest of our lives,” Miller said. “So there are going to be residual benefits to cities now. It seems there’s a real effort to diversify Miami’s economy beyond tourism and tax breaks, and the pandemic seems to be the grease that got that wheel going.”