Moishe Mana sells 30 Wynwood acres to Ken Griffin for $1.1 billion

Moishe Mana has closed the sale of roughly 30 acres of his Wynwood assemblage to Citadel founder and CEO Ken Griffin for approximately $1.1 billion, a figure the seller calls the most expensive land assemblage sale ever in South Florida. Six days before that sale was reported, Mana closed the $89 million purchase of Fort Lauderdale's 110 Tower.

After 16 years of assembling the site, the headline numbers work out to roughly $37 million an acre, and the land is planned for a new Carnegie Mellon University campus that Griffin is donating $3 billion to get going. That gift is described as the largest-ever by an individual in the history of higher education, and the campus is drawn at 35 acres, five more than the assemblage that sold, with plans to hold more than 3,500 undergraduate, master's and PhD students once complete, plus 300 faculty and upward of 600 staff. Construction should start in 2027 and the first student could enroll in 2028, with the campus organized around four themes instead of academic majors: human health and biological discovery; national security and strategic capabilities; energy and climate resilience; and advanced manufacturing and industrial transformation.

The 30 acres changed hands against 35 planned for the campus, with no word on where the rest of the land comes from, whether the $3 billion gift includes the $1.1 billion purchase, or who ends up holding title to the parcel. Mana's cost after 16 years of buying in Wynwood also goes unstated, leaving the headline price as the only figure attached to the land.

Per our records, that purchase closed on Sept. 24. The trade was described as clearing at $226 a foot on a 1031 bid, a discount that belongs to GEM's 2016 basis, with City National's $66.3 million loan the only third-party mark on the price. Selling acreage at a record and buying 1987 office space at a discount within a week of each other reads as a rotation out of land appreciation and into an older, cheaper asset, though the reports do not connect the two closings.

With construction starts frozen, buyers are paying for entitlement rather than buildings. Wynwood is that argument in its plainest form: $1.1 billion carried by acreage, a 2027 construction start, and no income attached to the site while it waits. Whether other owners in the neighborhood mark to $37 million an acre is the next thing to watch, and no comparables, if any, are disclosed.