Palm Beach County business news: Wall St. South Grows
Key points:
- • Greenberg Traurig leased an entire floor, about 25,000 SF, at 15 CityPlace for 10 years.
- • MSCI, Solomon Partners and Integrity Pro Consulting also signed leases at Phillips Point.
- • Related Ross secured $772M in construction debt financing for the CityPlace project.
September 2026 — Downtown West Palm Beach‘s skyline is about to gain more than steel and glass — it is gaining the region’s largest law firm tenant yet, a fresh marker of how deep the “Wall Street South” migration has reached into Palm Beach County. Palm Beach County business news this month centers on Greenberg Traurig’s decision to lease an entire floor, roughly 25,000 square feet, at 15 CityPlace, the 25-story, 481,000-square-foot tower now under construction in downtown West Palm Beach.
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The 10-year lease, with move-in slated for fall 2027, makes Greenberg Traurig the latest and largest name to commit space in a building developer Related Ross is assembling as the anchor of its CityPlace redevelopment, according to the Commercial Observer.
Greenberg Traurig currently occupies about 30,000 square feet at Phillips Point, the waterfront office complex Related Ross bought in 2021 for $282 million and has since put through a $120 million renovation. Tracy Gerber, co-managing shareholder of Greenberg Traurig’s West Palm Beach office, said the move “reflects our long-term commitment to the West Palm Beach market and positions us to meet increasing client demand throughout Palm Beach County and beyond,” a framing that speaks to how much the firm’s local client base has grown alongside the broader influx of financial and legal work into the county.
Following a well-worn path
That influx is showing up across Related Ross’s portfolio, not just at its newest tower. At Phillips Point, MSCI is leasing 7,500 square feet, Solomon Partners is taking 4,200 square feet and Integrity Pro Consulting has signed for 1,300 square feet — a cluster of asset managers, investment bankers and advisory firms following the same well-worn path that has carried major financial institutions south from New York and Connecticut over the past several years.
At 15 CityPlace, Related Ross has already pre-leased 125,000 square feet to Cleveland Clinic, pairing the building’s finance and legal tenants with a major health system in a combination the developer is betting will define West Palm Beach’s next commercial district. Related Ross secured $772 million in construction debt financing for the two-tower CityPlace project last year, underscoring how much capital is chasing the bet that West Palm Beach’s office market has room to keep growing rather than plateauing.
National story
The pattern fits a national story that has been building since the pandemic reshuffled where financial firms want to be. Migration out of high-tax, high-cost financial centers accelerated once remote work proved firms could operate effectively outside traditional headquarters cities, and Florida’s lack of a state income tax made South Florida a natural landing spot for asset managers and their executives.
What distinguishes Palm Beach County’s version of that migration from Miami’s is scale and pace: rather than one marquee relocation grabbing headlines, the county has absorbed a steady accumulation of mid-size leases — a few thousand square feet here, a floor there — that individually look modest but collectively have been enough to justify a developer borrowing more than three-quarters of a billion dollars to build a new tower speculatively.
Whether that bet keeps paying off will depend on how quickly Related Ross can fill 15 CityPlace’s remaining space before its fall 2027 delivery date and whether the law firms, asset managers, and health systems now clustering in downtown West Palm Beach start pulling in the ancillary businesses — restaurants, hotels, professional services firms — that typically follow a critical mass of high-paying office tenants.
Local officials will also be watching whether Greenberg Traurig’s move encourages other law firms serving the region’s growing wealth-management and private-equity client base to follow a similar upgrade path out of older office stock and into new towers.
For a county that spent decades known primarily for retirees and seasonal residents, the emergence of a genuine downtown financial and legal district would mark one of the more durable shifts in its economic identity, one that keeps building regardless of whether the broader Wall Street South narrative continues to grab national headlines.
Want more? Read the Invest: Palm Beach report.
