Record of ownership · Miami · 2006–2026
Between 2020 and 2022 a Miami firm assembled a hotel and office portfolio, took a 95-year federal leasehold in Washington, and co-sponsored a $650 million fund. By 2026 almost all of it had changed hands.
the rail breaks where the debt was sold
Each step below is a transfer of control. The accent rail on the left runs while the firm is acquiring and breaks where the debt was sold, after which every entry is an exit.
A 95-year federal leasehold on the Old Post Office building, bought from the Trump Organization and reopened as a Waldorf Astoria under a Hilton agreement. Read the entry
Madison Realty Capital took the debt on the downtown Miami hotel. From this point the chain is a sequence of exits rather than acquisitions. Read the entry
The Washington leasehold passed to the lender group after the debt on it went unserviced. Read the entry
Control of the firm’s own Coconut Grove headquarters passed to Torose Equities against a $32.5 million mortgage bought from Madison Realty Capital while the position was in UCC foreclosure. That was an enforcement, not a sale by the firm. Torose and Sabal Investment Holdings resold the building for $61 million in February 2026. Read the entry
One file per building. Each traces the purchase, the debt placed against it, and the party that holds it today, with the reporting that establishes each step named in place.
The files are organised around the ownership chain rather than around the buildings, because in this portfolio the two came apart. Control moved through the debt far more often than through a sale, and a record that tracked only who held title would describe the wrong thing entirely.
Where a matter is unresolved, such as a loan still in special servicing or a foreclosure not yet concluded, the file says so and stops rather than projecting an outcome.
Hotel · Miami
The Gabriel Miami
Downtown hotel, 129 rooms as reported. Debt sold to Madison Realty Capital in 2024.
Office · Coral Gables
550 Biltmore Way
Fifteen-storey Coral Gables office building, lost in 2026 and reported by The Real Deal.
Retail · Coral Gables
55 Miracle Mile
Coral Gables retail, secured by a $23.4M CMBS loan that later entered special servicing.
Flexible office · South Florida
Nexus Workspaces
Co-working portfolio expanded into Boynton Beach and Boca Raton before the unwind.
Hotel · Miami Beach
Gabriel South Beach
The former Celino, reopened under Hilton’s Curio Collection and later handed to its lender.
Hotel · Washington DC
The Old Post Office lease
A 95-year federal leasehold in Washington, bought for a reported $375M and reopened as a Waldorf Astoria.
Development · Atlanta
Morris Brown campus hotel
A $30M development commitment on the campus of a historically Black college in Atlanta.
Index · all assets
The full portfolio
Every asset the record covers, arranged by sector, hold period and eventual outcome.
CGI Merchant Group, LLC was founded in Miami in 2006 and spent its first decade as an advisory and capital-markets business rather than an owner of buildings. The pages under the firm trace that earlier practice, which ran under a different URL scheme and is easy to miss: capital markets, project finance advisory, and a real estate investment group sat alongside one another before the balance sheet held anything.
The acquisitive phase was short and unusually visible. In December 2020 the firm announced a $650 million hospitality fund co-sponsored with A-Rod Corp, with Maverick Capital Partners as joint venture partner. In March 2021 that fund committed $30 million to a hotel on the campus of Morris Brown College, a historically Black college in Atlanta. In 2022 came the two announcements the firm is still best known for: a $250 million investment partnership, and the purchase of the Old Post Office leasehold in Washington from the Trump Organization for a reported $375 million, reopened as a Waldorf Astoria under agreement with Hilton.
What followed is documented just as thoroughly, in the same trade publications, and receives the same treatment here. Between 2024 and 2026 the mortgage on the Gabriel Miami was sold to Madison Realty Capital; an art-deco South Beach hotel went to its lender rather than through a contested $69 million foreclosure; the Washington leasehold passed to a lender group; 550 Biltmore Way in Coral Gables was lost; the retail at 55 Miracle Mile entered special servicing; and the firm’s own Coconut Grove headquarters passed to Torose Equities against a $32.5 million mortgage bought from Madison Realty Capital while the position was in UCC foreclosure.
Read as a sequence rather than as separate headlines, the portfolio is a clean worked example of how leasehold interests, CMBS debt and co-general-partner structures behave when the operating assumptions underneath them stop holding. That is what the deal mechanics page is for: it explains the instruments this record keeps naming (ground leases, fee simple, special servicing, deed in lieu) using the transactions on this site as the worked examples, rather than in the abstract.
Third person throughout. No characterisation of any person. Every figure attributed to the publication or filing that carried it, and an announced number described as announced rather than confirmed.
That last distinction does more work than it looks. A figure stated once in a launch release gets repeated in every article that follows, and after enough repetitions it reads as established fact. Here it is described as announced every time it appears, however widely it has been reprinted elsewhere.
The subject of this record is a company that still operates and people who still work, so the standard is narrow on purpose: what a published source establishes, and nothing inferred from it.