TL;DR

• Amendment 3 would phase Florida’s homestead exemption from $50k up to $250k. A Tax Foundation model quoted by the Herald pegs the cost at roughly $291 per apartment per year in Miami-Dade, where 47.8% of households rent and 61% of tenants are already cost burdened.

• $4.5m buys the cheapest of 35 units at the Raffles-branded condo coming to South Bayshore — dirt assembled by terminating a 1967 condo for about $28m, with holdouts clearing roughly 49% more than the early sellers.

• Crescent Heights says it’s getting $5.50+/sqft. on Edgewater rentals — north of $5,000/mo for 1,000sqft. — while a rental building on Douglas advertises move-ins for $99 security.

• Brickell Class A office runs about $102/sqft. against a $74.75/sqft. county Class A average; City National Bank is moving its 134,000sqft. headquarters out of downtown, Apple took 45,000sqft. in the Gables, and Lone Star paid $120m for the Alhambra.

• TYKO Capital, a 3-year-old lender backed by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management ($80b AUM), just wrote an $817m construction loan for the Faena Residences on the Miami River — the largest in Florida history — part of roughly $5.5b it has pushed into South Florida.

If Amendment 3 Passes, Rents Will Go Up

Tuesday’s statewide ballot carries Amendment 3, which would phase the homestead exemption from today’s $50k up to $250k of taxable value — on top of the 3% assessment cap homesteads already enjoy. Great if you homestead. But Florida municipalities run on property taxes — no state income tax — so the money comes from somewhere. A Tax Foundation economist models the shift at about $291 per apartment per year in Miami-Dade, where 47.8% of households rent. Mayor Levine Cava, on WLRN, pegged the county shortfall at $400m in year one and $700m in year two — and said most counties have no plan to cover it. Expect millage hikes on non-homestead property, meaning rentals. Peter voted no; he’d rather Tallahassee attack insurance, where premiums vanish into out-of-state shell companies. His spicier take: if you want fairness, kill the exemption entirely and let everyone pay market. Either way, landlords pass this one straight through, and renters vote too. Needs 60% to pass; polling sits at 55–57%.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Raffles is Late to the Party

Raffles — the 139-year-old Singaporean hotel brand that invented the Singapore Sling in 1915 — just put its name on a 35-unit condo on South Bayshore from BH Group and Mast Capital. No hotel, no guests, units from $4.5m. The dirt comes from terminating a 1967 condo for about $28m, a multiyear buyout in which holdouts collected roughly 49% more than the early sellers. It pays to be a holdout. Of the four pan-regional condo markets — Miami, Singapore, Dubai, Hong Kong — those last two are effectively off the board, so Singaporean brands landing here is the natural trade, following Swire and Genting. Peter thinks the timing is right, not late. I’m less romantic. Every other luxury flag is spoken for, Mandarin Oriental’s buyers reportedly came mostly from the U.S. rather than Asia, and the Grove has absorbed exactly one new tower lately — Mr. C, where resales have blown past $1,600 and even $2,000/sqft. (if you really want the view). A $4.5m dumpster unit on a four-year delivery timeline is a lot of absorption to assume.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

Edgewater Multifamily Anomaly

National multifamily is in the dumps, yet Russell Galbut’s Crescent Heights says it’s getting $5.50+/sqft. on Edgewater rentals — north of $5,000/mo for 1,000sqft. — and everyone from Aimco to Oak Row to Adam Neumann’s Flow is listening. The asterisk: rentals don’t hit the MLS and there’s no public record, so it’s all self-reported. Meanwhile a building on Douglas is advertising $99 security to move in, Mill Creek just exited a site to a condo developer because the rental math failed, and greater downtown’s ‘02–’11 boom — 11,500 units to 33,000 — is aging into milestone inspections and the special assessments that follow. Galbut works because he bought his dirt out of the Great Recession, Africa Israel’s castoffs, and can afford to sit — and he’s doubling down with Forma II. The newcomers paid boom prices and have never been stress-tested. Vlad Doronin sits on a half-acre here at a roughly $10m all-in basis you couldn’t replicate if you begged, and Kushner is building what looks like the neighborhood’s only new bayfront multifamily. Peter says this isn’t an anomaly at all — it’s an indicator, and he’s taking the other side of the trade.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

People Would Rather Work in the Gables

City National Bank is moving its 134,000sqft. headquarters out of downtown. Apple took 45,000sqft. in the Gables. Lone Star paid $120m for the Alhambra and cited bedroom communities, private schools, and cheaper rent. Brickell Class A runs about $102/sqft. against a $74.75/sqft. county Class A average, with roughly 14% of space available. Office developers tell me the Gables’ 16% share of county leasing — versus Brickell’s 25% — is only that low because the city makes new office painful to build. We could look at Brickell as the loss-leader address, Lincoln Road for office, while the actual work gets done in Miami Lakes and Kendall.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

In TYKO We Trust

TYKO Capital didn’t exist three years ago. On Wednesday it wrote the largest construction loan in Florida history — $817m for the Faena Residences on the Miami River — three weeks after dropping $507m on 1250 West, David Martin’s Miami Beach tower that hasn’t even launched. By our count the firm, a partnership between ex-debt-broker Adi Chugh and Paul Singer’s Elliott Management ($80b AUM), has put roughly $5.5b into South Florida, about a third of it behind Martin projects — the Well, the Grand Hyatt convention center hotel, Villa Miami, Mr. C West Palm — plus Rivage and the St. Regis. They don’t syndicate; they just write the check. Peter’s seen this movie: Corus Bank financed the ‘02–’11 boom until the FDIC handed its book to Barry Sternlicht’s ST Residential, then Bank OZK showed up in 2012 and owned the next cycle. Notably, OZK is now syndicating its loans — a de-risking tell if there ever was one. Hot money is the dealer and developers are the junkies, and some of this flavor is loan-to-own. But if TYKO won’t write your check, you’re off to Uncle Jeffrey Soffer, trading whatever equity you have left. Somebody has to fund the pipeline, and Rialto will happily service the mistakes.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

—Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• Amendment 3 would cost Miami-Dade $400m in year one and $700m in year two, per the mayor, while Tallahassee cut roughly $20m from local arts and the Arsht’s billboards would bring in about $1m a year.

• Russell Galbut pulled three Miami Beach Live Local towers, including a 42-story, 163-unit filing at 1575 Alton on a street with a 50-foot height limit.

• Private marina waitlists can be years long; remaining inventory at Related’s St. Regis at 1809 Brickell starts around $8m with no marina, and the City Commission approved, without debate, letting Related apply for one on city-owned bay bottom.

• Miami-Dade has 70,000 registered boats; the 1993 Save Our Parks amendment requires a two-thirds vote for commercial park leases but exempts the Seaquarium by name, and an October 21 lawsuit says the 56.7 acres of bay bottom were never part of the deal.

Billboards are the Way

The Adrienne Arsht Center wants digital LED billboards. Not to promote the shows; this is revenue, roughly $1m a year. The neighborhood alliance says no, and Commissioner Damian Pardo told the Herald that nonprofits shouldn’t make money from billboards. He ran on that, so at least he’s consistent.

My problem: Tallahassee just cut about $20m from the arts, and we’re fighting over $1m. When PAMM settled with the city over its billboards, the signs stayed and the city took about $500k a year. Expect the same split. The Arsht runs 80,000 kids a year through its education programs. They don’t vote yet, but they live here.

Peter’s point: Miami’s brand is eye candy. If a billboard bothers you, wait until they light the Signature Bridge. Peter would also put naming rights on five-year leases, like cemetery plots in Manila: renew, or make room for billboards. If you paid $20m for a penthouse on Biscayne and didn’t expect bright lights, the Redlands are lovely.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Sick of Live Local

Russell Galbut of Crescent Heights pulled three Miami Beach Live Local towers after talks with Vicki Lopez, the bill’s original House sponsor, now running for county commission and against her own bill (to be fair, she’s against the latest iteration of the very much expanded bill aka Live Local 4.0). 1575 Alton was filed at 42 stories and 163 units, then cut to 19 and 63 the week before withdrawal; the ordinary height limit there is 50 feet.

Live Local lets a developer skip local approval entirely if 40% of units rent at workforce rates tied to area median income. Tax abatements start at 40% and reach 100% if the whole building is workforce. The loophole is the other 60%, which has no guidance: $3,000/sqft condos qualify, and in the Design District and soon the Grove, that’s what the math produces.

Market rents in some submarkets now sit below “workforce” rents, by $20 to $50 a month, but below. Peter thinks Galbut’s exit is less politics than 7.5% mortgage rates, a 10-year north of 5%, and 3.7% inflation. Vicki, come on the show and pitch us Live Local 4.0 - 3.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Indifferent about Differential Settlement

A University of Miami study flagged sinking barrier-island towers a few years ago, and the national press decided Sunny Isles was falling into the sea. It isn’t. A structural engineer told me those piles go 200 feet to bedrock, and she worries more about the lowest bidder on the Indian Creek pedestrian bridge than a $150m condo on the sand.

UM’s Falk Amelung, whose 2024 paper flagged 35 towers sinking more than anticipated, now tracks them by satellite. The new term is differential settlement: one side settling faster than the other. Centimeters, but concrete doesn’t flex. It cracks.

The risk is reputational; think Chinese drywall. Architects like Kobi Karp going on TV to call the first study no big deal was the wrong move. Leave a vacuum and the YouTubers hammering the Aston Martin Residences fill it.

Put it in the milestone inspections and the SIRS. Sunny Isles already carries 30 to 40 months of condo supply; if your tower makes the list, your resale eats it. Neither of us is indifferent.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Submerged Schmumerged

There’s no marina space left in Miami; private waitlists run three to five years. Enter the St. Regis at 1809 Brickell, Nick and JP Pérez’s first project out from under dad’s shadow: entry around $7m to $8m, no marina. In September the City Commission approved, without debate, letting Related and Integra Investments file permit applications for a marina and “related facilities” on city-owned submerged land off the site. Permission to apply, not a lease, but nobody said don’t bother.

The charter requires a referendum to sell city land, not to lease it. That workaround used to build affordable housing. This is a luxury marina.

Peter’s guardrail is DERM, which hasn’t allowed Swire a single slip on Brickell Key since 1980. If Related gets this, why not Mandarin Oriental, Jade, Villa Miami, Icon Bay? I came in a hold. I like development, but you can’t undo bay-bottom construction, and I’ve watched crews dump into the bay from dry land. Peter grossed me out. If the city does it anyway, price it like contemporary art: $10m a slip.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Seaquarium Deal Needs A Vote

The Seaquarium sits in a county park on Virginia Key, and redeveloping county parkland means a countywide referendum. Usually. The 1993 Save Our Parks amendment requires a two-thirds vote for commercial leases in parks and aquatic preserves; Section 7.02 exempts the Seaquarium by name, plus marina facilities, provided there’s no adverse impact on natural resources.

David Martin’s Terra took the lease from the defunct Dolphin Company for $20-something million, and the plan includes a marina for a county with 70,000 registered boats and scarce slips. Shallow water there means dredging. A lawsuit filed October 21 argues the 56.7 acres of bay bottom were never part of the lease, so the marina needs a vote after all.

In 1993, Peter reminds me, tourists were being robbed off rental-car tags; nobody was reading charter carve-outs. But Miami Dade College gave away land valued north of $360m for a presidential library; anything is possible when the county is rubbing its nickels together.

As the ballot lies, it doesn’t need a vote. Should it? Probably. Peter’s a sell: the language is the language. I’m holding, partly to put some color on the board.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

—Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• $19/sqft: roughly what Moishe Mana’s $5m offer works out to on the 1928 Dade County Courthouse, all 265,000sqft. of it, after a $35m ask drew four deposits and zero bids.

• 22%: the Metrobus and Metrorail fare hike approved 9-4 on Oct. 6, from $2.25 to $2.75 starting in January, the first since 2013. The Metromover is still free, against about $38m in operating costs and roughly $5 a ride.

• 20.8%: the share of Miami’s tree trust fund spending that went to actual tree replacement from 2015 to 2019, per a 2021 audit. City code requires 80% every year.

• $450m: the Safe and Ready Miami bond on the Nov. 3 ballot, with $300m for a combined police and fire headquarters and $150m for fire stations. All-in, it runs $795m. Interest rates, amirite?

Two Plans, One Courthouse

The old Dade County Courthouse opened in 1928 as the tallest building in Florida. Al Capone had a court date there. Now it’s 265,000sqft. of asbestos and leaks on a 1.7-acre block. It went up on GovDeals at $35m. Four parties posted deposits. Nobody bid.

Two offers followed.

Plan A: Russell Galbut of Crescent Heights will pay the $35m, but he wants a skyscraper approved right up against it and the tax revenue steered into the courthouse instead of police and schools.

Plan B: Moishe Mana, flush with 1031 money after selling his Wynwood dirt to Ken Griffin aka Ken Billions for $1.1bn, is offering $5m and talking about a cultural center. That’s about $19 a foot for a building that cost $4m in 1928. You can’t buy parking for that.

Peter rejects both.

Peter’s Plan C: Sell the nearby library site, which he says the county already wants to redevelop as housing, and use the cash to make the courthouse a cultural center and museum. His read on Mana: land banker, with Flagler Street as Exhibit A. They do call him Moishe Mañana. I still think this could be his catalyst. Buy meant Galbut. Sell meant Mana.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Hold 🟨

Keep the Metromover Free

On Oct. 6, the county commission voted 9-4 to raise Metrobus and Metrorail fares from $2.25 to $2.75 starting in January. That’s 22%, the first increase since 2013. The Metromover has been free for 20-plus years. In a red state.

Charging is back on the table. Under Mayor Carlos Gimenez in 2014, the math killed it: about $9m in ticketing equipment to collect maybe $1.5m a year on a $1 fare. Some commissioners now say the equipment would cost $250k. Commissioner Raquel Regalado’s report puts operating costs around $38m, roughly $5 a ride, so a dollar softens the hit without covering it.

Peter remembers when it cost a quarter and nobody rode it. Now everybody’s on it, and it clears the Miami River while the drawbridges are up. He’d charge $1 or $2, sell a $30 monthly pass, discount residents, and make the Downtown Development Authority chip in.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Cities Should Commit to the Underline

The Underline is the 10-mile linear park under the Metrorail, from the Miami River to Dadeland, to the tune of $140m. It crosses Miami, Coral Gables, and South Miami. Then the maintenance bill showed up. Miami said fine. South Miami said fine. The Coral Gables Commission is claiming bait and switch.

The estimate is $4.94m over five years. I thought this was the City Beautiful. Its stretch of US-1 is lined with luxury rentals. Friends of the Underline and Meg Daly did the hard part. Peter’s fix if the Gables won’t pay: sell the sponsorship to the nearest gentlemen’s club and watch how fast the city finds the money.

The real estate angle: Silver Bluff sits on the Underline side of US-1, while Coconut Grove across the road trades at a premium. Much of the same canopy, and no crossing US-1 to reach a pedestrian freeway into Brickell. The weak spot is the crossings, six avenues from 16th to 37th alone.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Trees Are Whatever

The City of Miami has a tree trust fund. Remove a tree with a permit and you pay in, roughly $1k per two inches of trunk diameter, so a 60-inch tree runs about $30k. Skip the permit and the fine goes in too. City code requires at least 80% of the fund to go back into planting trees.

A 2021 city audit found that from 2015 to 2019, only 20.8% did. Another $93k went to staff certifications, T-shirts, computers, meals, and office supplies. Coconut Grove Spotlight reported commissioners were set to vote on moving $996k out of the citywide tree planting line into three other capital projects. We didn’t have the result by showtime.

You can spot where Coral Gables starts and ends on Google Maps. It’s green. So are the home values, same as Coconut Grove. Raise the fees, raise the fines, audit the fund.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Miami Doesn’t Need No Stinkin’ Bond

City of Miami voters get to choose if they want the Safe and Ready Miami general obligation bond on Nov. 3: $450m, with $300m for a combined police and fire headquarters at Freedom Park and $150m for fire stations. Early voting starts on the 19th. All-in, it costs about $795m, and we’re still paying off last decade’s bond.

The current police headquarters sits on 6+ acres of downtown dirt. Peter’s back-of-the-napkin comp is Sawyer’s Walk two blocks north: 3.4 acres acquired for about $10m. On that old math, the police site is $20m of dirt. It’s got to be way more. Peter says call it $50m to $100m today. I’d sell it first and do a leaseback until the department has a new home. Putting $450m on this ballot is premature.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• 150 units an acre: what the City of Miami’s Little Havana upzoning would allow, with no affordable or workforce housing requirement and room for up to 19,500 new residents. The neighborhood already 16 Live Local projects proposed.

• $243m: the size of the 30-year Allapattah CRA plan. On Sept. 24, the city authorized a lawsuit to force the county’s hand on it. Median household income in Allapattah is $31,300, and 80% of residents rent.

• $65,000 a door: Peter’s estimate for a special assessment at a 5- to 14-story building doing post-Surfside repairs. The big kickback case, at the Hammocks, involves $11m.

• $3bn: Ken Griffin’s gift to Carnegie Mellon, reportedly the largest ever to a university, with a campus going on the Wynwood land he bought from Moishe Mana for $1.1bn. Mana says he put in less than $70m.

Upzonetopia

Little Havana was built on fourplexes, sixplexes, and eightplexes, many owned by the same families since the ‘50s and ‘60s. If those are your grandparents, tell them to keep holding: the city wants to allow 150 units an acre.

Commissioner Rolando Escalona calls it a counterpunch to Live Local, which lets developers build as tall as anything within a mile, administratively, with a tax abatement. Little Havana has 16 proposed. The city’s pitch: take our density instead, and the taxes stay on the rolls. No affordable or workforce requirement, and room for up to 19,500 new residents along the Flagler corridor. Hope you like traffic.

Peter has Little Havana’s average pending condo price at $413 a foot, up from $372 in April. Vintage (at least 30 years old) went from $285 to $336.

My hesitation: no vision. The Design District looks the way it does because Craig Robins controlls about 80% of it. Little Havana has no patron, so expect a Brickell-and-Wynwood mishmash.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

Allapattah: Trouble in Paradise

On Sept. 24, the city authorized a lawsuit to force the county’s hand on a $243m, 30-year Allapattah CRA. It would freeze the tax base and steer the increment into potholes and streetlights. County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava isn’t happy, so the land play waits on a court to decide who controls the money. Surely nobody’s cousin is lined up for the light-fixture contract.

Median household income is $31,300, and 80% of residents rent. Longtime owners in the old Dominican warehouse district sit on rock-bottom cost basis.

The dead-end streets are scars from the old Seaboard rail terminus, and if you’re not on the 112, good luck getting in or out. But the Rubells moved here from Wynwood, Moishe Mana has acreage, and Lissette Calderón is going in big.

We’ve seen CRAs in Overtown do some good and get mismanaged. I’m still a fan. So is Peter, with an asterisk: audits and oversight.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Slippery Slopes at Condo Building Remediation Mountain

After Surfside, deferred maintenance stopped being an option. Balconies, pools, windows, parking: fix it now. Buy in and you’re looking down the barrel of a special assessment, about $65,000 a door at a 5- to 14-story building, by Peter’s estimate.

Within 3-miles of the coast (defined by the mouth of the Miami River), milestone inspections hit at 25 years. Starting in January, Fannie Mae wants 15% of the budget in reserves. If Fannie won’t finance your building, your buyers are cash or private money that wants a discount.

Volunteer HOA boards now steer $5m to $30m remediations. Hence the contractor-fraud cases at Venetian Gardens at Country Club and Euclid East in South Beach, and an $11m kickback case at the Hammocks. A decade ago, my rental’s pool was under construction for my entire lease. The HOA president had the contractors renovating his unit instead.

When associations borrow, banks underwrite the contractor’s number, and hustling an FDIC-insured bank isn’t like ripping off abuela. However you boil it down, much of Miami-Dade is going to be a construction site for the next decade.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

MG = Maybe Goners

These are allegations! Eight suits filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court in recent weeks seek $21.4m from MG Developer, mostly over promissory notes on private loans of $750k to $6m. None seek foreclosure; the lenders want MG to refinance and finish. But when one private lender knocks, others follow.

MG is a Venezuelan father-son team that made its name on high-end Gables townhomes before going vertical, from Alhambra Parc to North Bay Village with Prosper Group. A 2025 Real Deal profile put its pipeline above $500m. Earlier this year, MG appears to have sold its stake at 1725 Kennedy Causeway for $20m. Paying off old debt, or reading the writing on the wall?

Peter pulled MG Sunbiz filing registered Feb. 12, 2014. In his book, anyone who broke ground after 2012 has never seen a Miami downturn or learned that trees don’t grow to the moon. Jorge Pérez once handed his lenders boxes of keys, and they handed them back: banks don’t want condos. Private lenders might. With a 30-year fixed at 7.577%, Peter’s message to MG: you hit it at the right time, and now you’re getting stress tested. I’m rooting for them.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

Ken Billions Earned His Nickname This Week

Ken Griffin, aka Ken Billions, paid $1.1bn for roughly 30 Wynwood acres Mana started assembling in 2009. Mana says he put in less than $70m. That’s about 16x.

The site gets a Carnegie Mellon campus, part of a $3bn gift that’s reportedly the largest ever to a university.

Peter takes the under. He thinks Mana hustled Griffin, and that locals will call it Carne y Melón University. Why import Pittsburgh when you could fund UM or FIU and poach CMU’s brain trust? Still, he’s a buy on the real estate. On the culture, he says Griffin blew it.

I think it’s great, and education is a foundation. But we already have universities, and there’s a cultural cost. Remember Fusion, ABC and Univision’s attempt to blend New York and Miami TV cultures? My over/under on Ken Billions helipads over the next decade: five. I’m taking the over.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• $28m: what New York’s Allied Partners paid in 2005 for the 1937 Savoy, which sits just outside the historic district. The plan is 150 residences (90 condos, 60 workforce units to hit Live Local’s 40% threshold) plus 76 hotel rooms.

• $139,000: the income Flow Edgewater’s cheapest unit requires under the 30% rule. Miami-Dade’s median household income is $71,800, and the 296-unit tower is offering a free month on select units.

• $13m+: allegedly unpaid work that vendors and subcontractors are chasing at Miami Freedom Park, on 73 city-owned acres that about 60% of voters approved for a 99-year lease in 2018.

• $975k: what Grand Theft Auto VI’s publisher is paying the county for a “Welcome to Vice City” sign on the Kaseya Center, just under the $1m mark that triggers a commission vote.

• $89m: what Moishe Mana paid for 110 Tower, a 30-story office building in Fort Lauderdale’s Justice District.

Sayonara, Savoy

The Savoy, a 1937 hotel south of Fifth, sits just outside the historic district. The 2024 Resiliency and Safe Structures Act, sponsored by Miami’s own Bryan Ávila, bars coastal cities from blocking the demolition of buildings that don’t meet FEMA standards. Stack Live Local on top and developers get a long leash and a tax abatement, provided at least 40% of units are workforce housing at 80% to 120% of AMI.

The law says nothing about the other 60%. So Allied Partners, which paid $28m for the site in 2005, plans 90 condos, 60 workforce units, and 76 hotel rooms. And at 120% of AMI, “workforce” rent isn’t exactly cheap. Peter compared it to the only bodega in a food desert: two extra bucks on everything.

To Peter, the Savoy is Depression-era rebuilding after the 1926 hurricane (block, rebar, and a nice paint job), not a landmark. His rule for any developer without three projects on the board in South Florida: take the under. Add 7.5% mortgage rates, immigration enforcement thinning out crews, and post-Surfside milestone restorations soaking up the rest, and he can’t make it pencil. Pencil or not, this is the template for barrier-island redevelopment.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Flow Knows Something the Rest of Multifamily Doesn’t

Adam Neumann’s Flow bought another one: Flow Edgewater, formerly The Watermarc, 296 units over 28 stories, tucked behind the Edition site that used to be Biscayne 21. Price undisclosed. Asking rents run $3,500 to $4,800 for one- to three-bedrooms, with a free month on select units. Concessions, concessions, concessions.

Every attorney, developer, and asset manager I talk to says multifamily is hurting, so I ran the numbers. The census puts Miami-Dade’s median household income at $71,800 and median gross rent at $1,829. Flow’s cheapest unit asks nearly double the median rent, and under the 30% rule it needs about $139,000 of income. That’s the two Miamis in one lobby.

Peter’s case: REITs that overbuilt from 2021 to 2023 are cutting rents, it’s cheaper to rent than own, and Fannie Mae eliminated limited review, making a condo-conversion exit a slog. So why buy? His theory: when investors hand you money, you don’t give it back. You burn it. The numbers, he says, will not pencil.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Mo’ Money, Mas Problems

Vendors and subcontractors are chasing more than $13m in allegedly unpaid work at Miami Freedom Park, the Nu Stadium-anchored project on the former Melreese golf course.

In 2018, about 60% of voters approved a 99-year lease on 73 city-owned acres for a supposedly private development. Now the City of Miami is moving municipal offices there, and federal money Mayor Eileen Higgins brought home is funding a $20m pedestrian bridge. With Ares, Beckham, and the Mas brothers involved, the subs are allegedly still waiting on checks.

Peter’s read: slow-paying subs and settling at the end is a common developer move when the economy turns. He also pulled a 2019 report: team-hired consultants found arsenic, lead, and barium above legal limits, left over from an old municipal incinerator. The plan, per Peter: pile it in the middle, fence it, don’t dig. Any tenant signing a five- to 10-year lease is betting on Messi, in a town that only shows up for winners.

Rico, our top YouTube commenter, asked it best: who puts a stadium where you can’t do fireworks because of the planes?

We should have called it No Money, Mas Problems.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Miami Vice Campaign Doesn’t Move the Needle

Grand Theft Auto VI mapped Miami so precisely it makes Google Street View look lazy. The publisher is paying the county $975k for a “Welcome to Vice City” sign on the Kaseya Center, and some people’s hair is on fire about cashing in on crime.

Our local budgets run into the billions. A tip I got mid-show explains the odd number: contracts under $1m skip a commission vote. FTX’s letters up there were huge because FTX had more money than God. This one’s a little weenie. The DDA collects $30m to $40m in downtown taxes. Spring for a bigger sign.

Peter says lean in. Carl Fisher only took off when he quit chasing the conservative Palm Beach buyer and went after the YOLO crowd. Orlando does children’s entertainment; Miami does the other kind.

We’re a tourism town. Everyone forgets in half an hour.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

“Stay in Miami, Moishe!”

Moishe Mana paid $89m for 110 Tower, a 30-story office building in Fort Lauderdale’s Justice District, across from the Broward County Courthouse. This from a man with roughly 80 buildings around Flagler Street in dire need of redevelopment, who reportedly just made serious coin selling part of Wynwood to Ken Griffin, though nobody has disclosed the numbers.

Peter wants to know why he’s spending across the county line. Mana talked up legacy on the South Florida Business Journal podcast with Brian Bandell, but in Peter’s telling he’s made money without getting anything over the finish line. Flagler’s main attraction is still a Ross Dress for Less in the old Burdines building, and the five-block streetscape rebuild (a decade, roughly $40m) is supposedly done. No excuses left. Start swinging hammers, or turn the empty office buildings into a haunted house.

I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. It smells like a tax play, probably a 1031 off the Wynwood sale.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• $200B: what catastrophe modeler Karen Clark & Company says the 1926 hurricane would cost on the same track today, versus $27.3B for Andrew (in 1992 dollars). The tri-county area now holds an estimated $5 trillion in insurable assets.

• 100 of 450: the rooms at Henry Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel that came with a private bathroom. His price for bringing the railroad to Miami in 1896 was half of Julia Tuttle’s 640 acres and half of the Brickell’s land.

• $2.11 a foot: a 1929 classified offered 95,000sqft. of ocean-to-creek land on Indian Creek for $200,000. An acre ran about $40,000, or $700K to $800K in today’s money.

• 100 ships stuck outside the harbor, 32 trapped inside, six weeks to clear: the January 1926 capsizing of the 241-foot Prinz Valdemar, at a moment when the only railroad had embargoed freight.

The 1926 Hurricane was Worse Than Andrew

There was no cone in 1926, just flags. The warning went up at 11:30 the night before; six or seven hours later a Category 4 drove its eye up what is now Brickell Avenue (and 20 miles in every direction). People walked outside in the calm to pick up the pieces, and about 35 minutes later got the back half. The recorded toll is 372 or so, but it could be 1,000. Add 6,000 injured and a quarter of the city homeless.

Andrew came through Homestead in August 1992 and did $27.3B in damage, $15.5B of it insured. It also gave us the modern building code, impact windows and, per Peter, Miramar, built on “St. Andrew” insurance checks.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

The Royal Palm Hotel was the Place to Be

If you live at Met 1, you live on top of it. Henry Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel sat at the mouth of the Miami River: roughly 450 rooms, 100 with private bathrooms, which tells you what the other 300 were working with in August.

Flagler, Rockefeller’s logistics man, invented destination tourism by rolling up small railroads and parking hotels at the end of the line. Julia Tuttle, with 640 acres on the river, gets credit for luring him south after the Great Freeze of 1894–95. When he dredged a basin for his guests’ boats, the story goes, he dumped the spoil outside old man Brickell’s place. Hence Brickell Key.

Miami was dry and ended at 11th Street, yes, where E11EVEN is. For debauchery you crossed 11th; for everything else there was the Royal Palm. After the storm the hotel fell into disrepair, and the Florida East Coast Railway went under in September 1931.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Miami Beach is too Damn Expensive

I pulled the classifieds. A 1929 ad, so after the storm, offered 95,000sqft. of ocean-to-creek land on Indian Creek for $200,000, or $2.11 a foot. An acre on the creek ran about $40,000, call it $700K to $800K today.

The 1925 numbers explain the swagger: $60M in Miami building permits, more than $1B in bank clearings, $100M in sales at Merrick’s Coral Gables, $33M at the Miami Shores Company. Carl Fisher was worth an estimated $100M at the top.

“Buy now, they’re not making more” is Florida’s oldest line, and 100 years ago they were making plenty. The Venetian Islands came off the bay bottom, and until 1925 the plan was at least six more marching north; the pilings are still visible from the Julia Tuttle. Indian Creek, today’s Billionaire Bunker, was planned for hundreds of little single-family homes.

I sold it: $40,000 was a barrel of bucks, and still cheap for an acre on Indian Creek. Peter split his ticket.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Buy 🟩 before the storm, Sell 🟥 the day after

The Prinz Valdemar Foreshadowed the End of the Land Boom

The boom had a logistics problem: one railroad, so jammed with passengers that freight was embargoed and materials had to come by sea. In January 1926 the Prinz Valdemar, a 241-foot Danish four-master that developers bought to haul cargo and then park as a floating hotel, tried to turn around in the basin, hit a sandbank and went over. About 100 ships stacked up outside, 32 were trapped inside, and clearing the wreck took six weeks. It’s the same turning basin the cruise ships use today.

This was the start of a very bad year for Miami. The embargo didn’t lift until summer, and the hurricane landed right before the winter buying season opens in November. So the mayor did the Miami thing and downplayed the damage, the Red Cross disagreed, and relief money came up short. The University of Miami, broke, named its new football team for the storm, or so the lore goes.

Supply chain chaos, a post-Spanish flu sugar high, stocks on 10-to-1 margin. Peter pounded the table on the similarities.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Miami Will Recover From This

It did, just not for the people who built it. Per Miami historian Dr. Paul George, Coral Gables carried $35M in creditor claims by 1929, the year the Coral Gables Corporation went bankrupt. George Merrick had been selling since 1921 on a bet that the Tamiami Trail would arrive; it opened in April 1928, two years too late. He died in 1942 as Miami’s postmaster with an estate under $400.

The second settlers did fine. The founder of Keyes came down to sell the boom, pivoted to distressed deals and appraisals, and the brokerage is still here a century later. Miami Beach went downmarket with cheap construction and called the decoration Art Deco. Peter dates the real turn to World War II: train here, fall in love, come back with a VA loan.

Back in 2026, with the 30-year fixed north of 7%, nobody is transacting, and the binder-boy condos of the early 2000s are hitting their 25-year milestone inspections and the repair bills that follow. And yet. After 9/11 the Four Seasons on Brickell shut its sales center because nobody wanted the 70th floor. Now the Waldorf is selling 100 stories at a premium. Miami keeps coming back, partly because it keeps forgetting.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

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We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

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Our special guest this week was Alfredo Pujol: Miami native, 20 years in the business, ran a 300-agent, $5B Keller Williams team, now chairman of Miami Realtors and sales manager of my Compass office. He walked in Thursday asking when he could come on. I said tomorrow. He said, “I’m game.” Mortgage rates just hit 7.07%.

TL;DR

• Two and a half weeks, one four-hour lunch, 13 years of failed attempts: the Miami Realtors–RWorld merger closed in May, and the paperwork includes a clause giving Realtors a future cut of revenue from their own listing photos.

• $4B, 30 years, and a lot of lawsuits: what it took Boston to clean a harbor it treated as a sewer into the 1980s. Miami counted roughly 57,000 dead fish in one 2020 kill, DERM says over 75% of the Julia Tuttle Basin’s seagrass has died since 2013, and this city had no sewage plant until 1956.

• $71K: the average local salary, per Miami Realtors’ data. Income arriving from New York averages $174K; Illinois, $172K; Washington, $164K; California, $155K. It now costs more to live here than in New York.

• 30%: the margin a developer is chasing on every $1,000. Paraiso’s four towers got a $25–$30-a-drink restaurant instead of a park, the arena’s park is 20-plus years overdue, and the Five Park pedestrian bridge is now at a 0% chance.

• 60 cents on the dollar: Peter’s ceiling in any building over 30 years old.

RWorld Makes Our World Better

Miami Realtors merged with RWorld, the board to our north, in May after 13 years of trying; the deal took two and a half weeks: one four-hour lunch on the Broward line (RWorld paid; Alfredo had the rib eye), attorneys, done. Alfredo’s case: one dataset from Orlando to the Keys, and an association lobbying as the biggest Realtor board on earth.

The clause I care about: I pay for listing photos, upload them to the MLS, and Zillow, Redfin, and realtor.com scrape them for free. The merger docs give Realtors a future claim on revenue if that content ever sells; Alfredo wouldn’t sign without it… if you ever see $1 back, you’re welcome.

Peter’s Hold is about silence. 42% of the tri-county population is foreign-born, 55% in Miami-Dade, the association’s own report puts international buyers behind more than half of pre-construction condo sales, and the industry hasn’t said a word about masked agents pulling people into vans. Not political, economic. The chief statistician is on it; Peter turns Buy once the big stick swings.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨
Alfredo: Buy 🟩

The Bay is OKAY

A Miami Herald op-ed this month says we can save Biscayne Bay by copying Boston, whose harbor was a sewer into the 1980s. Lawsuits, $4B of infrastructure, and, per Alfredo’s homework, 30 years later it has some of America’s cleanest urban beaches.

Our numbers: roughly 57,000 dead fish in the 2020 kill, and DERM estimates over 75% of the Julia Tuttle Basin’s seagrass has died since 2013. Every plan on the table, Seaquarium to Marine Stadium basin, says more marinas. Maybe the bay is already too full of boats.

Peter’s history lesson, via a 1947 Herald cartoon Casey Piket dug up: Haulover was cut in the 1920s for circulation because the land boom dumped sewage straight into the bay, and Miami had no wastewater plant until 1956. We cleaned it once. We forgot. His fix, floated five of the last six weeks: tax every container through Dodge Island for the bay, then send the boxes to Port Everglades, three times our size, and turn the port into a condo site. The bay is not okay. Our administrators should sit with that before the next approval.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Hold 🟨
Alfredo: Sell 🟥

Navigating Miami is an Employable Skill

Barry University’s president wrote an op-ed called “Miami’s Having a Moment.” On a cost-of-living rubric that counts the car you don’t need in New York, we’re the East Coast’s most expensive city. Miami Realtors’ data: the average local earns $71K. Income arriving from New York averages $174K; Illinois, $172K; Washington, $164K; California, $155K.

My angle: the firms importing talent are underrating a skill nobody puts on a resume: operating in a city that speaks three languages per sentence. Hire locals, or you get the kid who does 14 hours at Space, burns out, and goes back to Chicago for the four seasons.

Peter covered banking here: every out-of-state bank that rolled up to Florida offloaded Miami-Dade, unable to absorb the culture. His rule: you’re not legit until year three, by which point you’re serious, in rehab, or in jail. If you moved here and you’re miserable, it’s not you, it’s Miami. Skip Space on Saturdays and learn Spanish.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Alfredo: Buy 🟩

Developers Need to Walk the Walk

The pedestrian bridge over 5th Street in Miami Beach, from Five Park to Terra and Russell Galbut’s park, had top notch renderings, a French designer, and now a 0% chance. The bridge was the giveback. That’s the play: float a park, get your variance (Ken Griffin, our Rockefeller per Alfredo, just got a 50-foot setback cut to 40 on his $2.5B tower), never build the park.

Peter’s framing: development is a 30% margin business. Pay $1,000 a foot and $300 is the developer’s; the county, school board, and city collect 30 years of property taxes. When a city wants more, it shakes down the developer for a public benefit. The mystery is the missing follow-through. Paraiso rerouted the streets off Biscayne for bay views and promised a park; four towers, 1,100–1,200 units, half a dog each, no green space, one restaurant at $25–$30 a drink. The arena’s park, promised 20-something years ago, is still a promise. Meanwhile Mayor Eileen Higgins brought $20M back from Washington for a pedestrian bridge at Melreese, a “private” development whose lessees look like municipal contracts.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Alfredo: Buy 🟩

Private Exclusive Listings are Good for the Market

Alfredo wears both hats, so we asked. Private exclusives have been here for years: mansions, celebrities, cops, politicians. The question is whether withheld data hurts the seller: go fully private and you’re commercial real estate, where nobody sees the numbers. The abuse is parking property that belongs on the market behind a coming-soon; the fix is seller education. It’s here to stay; Compass isn’t even the biggest user.

Peter’s counter: a condo is a commodity, rebar, cement, glass, pork bellies, AI tokens, and commodities want maximum information, not a dark pool. By 2032–2035, he says, compliant buildings trade online like stocks.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨
Alfredo: Hold 🟨

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• Four-plus years in the pipeline, with a rebuilt special-needs school and a century of free rent baked in: Crystal Palace in Coral Gables got a commission hearing featuring video of “neighbors” testifying from addresses whose actual residents have never heard of them.

• The Virginia Key marina lease on November’s ballot: 27.62 acres, 45 years plus two 15-year renewals, $2.2M minimum annual rent escalating to roughly $204M, plus 6% of gross revenue, against about $80M of private investment

• The Edition Residences in Edgewater is moving forward… three years late, 36 months to build, 2029 delivery after holdouts asked for roughly $50M.

• Kelly Tractor, a fourth-generation Caterpillar dealer founded in Clewiston in 1933, gets a text amendment redefining what’s allowed outside the UDB, while county staff say hundreds of acres of industrial land sit underused inside it.

• 195 permanent concrete moorings, up from 75 in the original plan, proposed for the Marine Stadium basin; the city’s defense is that it doesn’t intend for them to ever be full.

Crystal Clear Shenanigans in Coral Gables

Hat tip to VHL partner: Ralph Longo. Crystal Palace is a project up in North Gables by the Woman’s Club, four-plus years in the works, with a workforce housing component and a deal that rebuilds Crystal Academy, the special-needs school on the site that was falling apart, plus a hundred years of free rent. Deal with the devil? Maybe. But community organizations are strapped for cash, developers aren’t, and nobody else is writing that check.

At last week’s vote, an attorney showed up with video: “neighbors” testifying in support from addresses where the actual residents had never heard of them. Paid actors at public comment, and not just in the Gables. Peter had to register as a lobbyist to present to a commission, so why don’t these folks sign the same paperwork? Mayor Vince Lago did not seem perturbed. I still think this gets built. Peter thinks the developer missed the market while the fight dragged on, like George Merrick waiting on the Tamiami Trail in 1928, and gets to try again at 7% mortgage rates.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

The Rickenbacker Marina Gives the People What They Want

As it stands today, the marina does give the people what they want, so we’re both Buys on the statement and both a no on the plan. November’s ballot asks whether the city should lease 27.62 acres of Virginia Key, the Rickenbacker and Marine Stadium marinas, to Virginia Key LLC for 45 years plus two 15-year renewals, at $2.2M minimum annual rent (escalating to roughly $204M) plus 6% of gross, in exchange for about $80M of private redevelopment “in an environmentally sensitive manner.”

My problems: the last lease was ending in 2016, so this is priced on a 2017 basis. You’re telling me 26-plus acres of bayfront didn’t appreciate through COVID? If the property tax measure passes in November, and I think it does, the city needs the money. And 26 acres is not a one-operator, 45-year job. Peter’s comp is Watson Island: one group, one long lease, a Turkish developer that couldn’t perform. Peter calls for a master plan and a CRA.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

A New Page for the Edition

Biscayne 21 finally becomes a construction site next month, with a 36-month schedule. If you hold a reservation at the Edition, you’re looking at 2029, three years late. The holdouts were asking around $50M. Peter is dying on his hill that private equity bankrolled the lawsuit.

After a decade with one hotel in Middle Beach, does Edition still carry cachet, or is it the project that went sideways? I say it does: a real hotel brand that justifies $1,000+/night average daily rates (ADR), and the only hotel-branded pre-construction on that Edgewater bayfront strip (Villa Miami is a Major Food Group thing, not a hotel group).

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Move the Goalposts

The Urban Development Boundary (UDB) is the line between Miami-Dade’s suburbs and the rural land beyond. Kelly Tractor, a fourth-generation Caterpillar dealer founded in Clewiston in 1933, couldn’t lobby the line into moving. So after three years, a mayoral veto and a flip by Raquel Regalado, they’re getting a text amendment that redefines what can be built outside it instead. The wetland gets paved either way. Critics say it rewrites the rules instead of moving the line; they’re right.

County staff have noted hundreds of acres of underutilized industrial land inside the UDB, so why this site? Because you get to donate a few acres back to the wetlands, take the photo op and raise campaign money off it. The precedent is the problem: the next applicant with a 2.5 million sqft complex will ask what percentage he has to give back for his green light. Broward built horizontally to the swamp; Miami-Dade chose to go vertical. That choice now has a loophole, and everyone will drive an SUV through it.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

This Isn’t What We Meant by Infill Development

Separate from the referendum, just regular City of Miami business: 195 permanent concrete moorings railroaded into the Marine Stadium basin. The original plan was 75. The administration says it never intends for it to be full. Their intentions are always so good.

I rowed that basin with the Miami Rowing Club in high school; it’s the calmest water on the bay. Peter’s point: the National Park Service wouldn’t let Stiltsville rebuild, so what’s the difference between pilings for houses and pilings for 195 boats? DERM’s hair should be on fire.

My conspiracy theory: this is about clearing the moorings off Miami Beach and Dinner Key, because the city is going to land-lease the old City Hall site (land over $500,000 needs voter approval, which the Grove would never give), and you can’t sell condos for $4,000/sqft. with somebody’s sailboat in the view. Virginia Key, the segregated beach for most of this city’s history, becomes the island of forgotten toys. Peter’s counter: if you’re driving pilings anyway, fill it in and make more Virginia Key, like the failed artificial island south of the Julia Tuttle.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

TL;DR

• Adam Neumann’s Flow landed a $51M Ladder Capital loan for the $71.5M El Portal trailer-park site he took from Melo Group by roughly $400K (ouch), bankrolled by a $350M a16z check, the biggest the firm has ever written to one person.

• IT HAPPENED! Ken Griffin has closed on part of Moishe Mana’s 30–40-acre Wynwood assemblage, the deal both camps denied at $700M in January, on top of the $300M-plus office building he bought across the way. Denial is just a river in Egypt…

• PortMiami is a $61B-a-year operation, cruise and cargo combined, on 520 acres of Dodge Island. The pitch: send the cargo to Port Everglades and double the cruise berths from 10 to 20.

We’re Still in the 1st Inning of Brand Partnerships for Condos

Miami trails only Dubai in branded condo deals. The idea is that a brand earns its 15–30% premium across a two-to-five-year build by engaging buyers, training the sales team, and delivering the service the logo implied. The reality is a badge on a building, untrained brokers, no playbook, and a developer held hostage. If phase two looks like phase one, developers stop paying.

It’s not all doom and gloom, the hospitality branded plays have fared well over the years.

Peter’s bear case: you rent a name because you don’t have one. The Dezers brought in Trump because nobody knew them, and a license is paper — one bankruptcy judge later, Canyon Ranch on 69th and Collins is plain old Carillon. Condos are pork bellies: charge 20% more, pay the brand 10%, lose 20% of your equity when they walk.

My hold is narrower. Hospitality brands aren’t pushing out developers; they’re pushing out the FirstService Residentials that took $1.50/sqft for eons and delivered 50 cents of product. The new guys get $2.50/ft. Whether they deliver $2.50 of service is the question.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥
Henrique: Buy 🟩

Building is Easier in Miami (versus the rest of the world)

Henrique rejects the premise that Miami is the easy one. Miami isn’t a city, it’s a country with one door, and the same gatekeepers greet everyone. The guy who owns a supermarket somewhere gets told to “do development,” skips the research, and gets eaten. Chase a booming neighborhood and you’re already late.

Peter’s rule of three: first deal you overspend, second you get screwed, third they take you seriously. Alan Faena did one, left, and is back for the north bank of the Miami River after selling the Versailles site to Vlad Doronin for the Aman. He’s also the only developer who ever put his name on the building. Henrique wouldn’t advise it… the product is for the 100 people who have to buy it, not the guy building it.

Same with celebrities: a leaked Messi purchase of four units at Cipriani might move product, but a celebrity fronting a five-year project is one bad tweet from disaster, and ultra-wealthy buyers want less attention, not more. It’s Gangs of New York with cranes.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥
Henrique: Sell 🟥

Neumann’s Unlimited Cash Flowing into Miami

Adam Neumann set roughly $47 billion of WeWork on fire, exited a billionaire, and is now a Miami developer. Flow just secured a $51M Ladder Capital loan for the old El Portal trailer park, a $71.5M site he took from Melo Group at auction by about $400K. Behind him: a $350M a16z check, the biggest the firm has written to an individual — for a real estate fund, not a startup.

Henrique was a WeWork tenant when Elephant Skin was one guy, so he separates the vision (building a community brand from scratch is Neumann’s gift) from the management (the $40 billion part). His advice: don’t be the developer. Plug Flow into a respected co-developer’s dirt. Who’s Flow’s Tim Cook?

Flow House was a half-built Chetrit project Neumann took over when Chetrit wanted money off the table. And then there’s the Flow House condo project… many of the units didn’t sell to individuals; they got bulk-sold to institutional money. Neumann still hasn’t put his own shovel in the ground, and Peter would short it if he could. My theory: for a firm that funds moonshot AI, $350M on a rookie developer is the most risk-averse thing a16z has done in a decade — if AI goes to hell, they own dirt. Either way, the cash is flowing.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Henrique: Buy 🟩

If Ken Builds it They Will Come

Per The Real Deal: Ken Griffin has closed on part of Moishe Mana’s Wynwood assemblage, the $700M rumor both camps squashed in January. Price unknown. Add the $300M-plus office building he bought across the way in January and Griffin may be Wynwood’s largest landowner at 30–40 acres. Mana bought a bankrupt foreign trade zone for a song in 2009; now he has a tax bill and needs cash for Flagler.

Peter: Griffin has overpaid on everything he’s touched here, and Wynwood is played out — Michelin stars, no locals. His prescription is a data center with housing on top. Mine is schools: he can’t donate enough to Gulliver to get the plentitude of seats required for his executives’ kids, so build one.

Miami’s everything-for-yesterday mentality is why vision evaporates into white boxes. Nothing ages as fast as yesterday’s idea of tomorrow, and a four-year build is a bad place to ride coattails. I’m holding until I see a parcel map, a plan, and a lunch invitation.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥
Henrique: Hold 🟨

Miami = Wall Street of the South or Cruise Capital of the World?

For a hundred years Miami has called itself the Wall Street of the South. The true number: PortMiami runs $61 billion a year, cruise and cargo combined, on 520 acres. Cruises are real estate that floats, and the brands know it: Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and even Alo (did you know that it stood for Air, Land, Ocean ?!) have yachts. On a ship, the hotel is the brand and the operator is the developer.

The pitch: send cargo to Port Everglades, go cruises-only, double the berths from 10 to 20, and master-plan the rest with marine-branded condos. Peter adds bungee jumps off the gantry cranes. The nickname turns 100 in three weeks, same as the hurricane that ended the last boom. Buy the boats.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Henrique: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• Both sides denied the rumored $700M Ken Griffin offer for Moishe Mana’s Wynwood assemblage but Griffin bought a Class A Wynwood office building the same month of the denial, $180m of skin in the neighborhood already.

• A reverter clause written in 1974 clicked in after the City of Miami handed donated Brickell parkland to Perricone’s for commercial outdoor seating; the Allen Morris organization can now take the dirt back.

• Per Business Insider, eight of the biggest multi-strategy funds — Millennium, Citadel, and Point72 among them — employed a combined 218 investment professionals in Miami in 2025.

• Relocating Miami City Hall would free up 15–20 waterfront acres at Dinner Key: call it five tower sites at $150–200M each, roughly $1B in dirt, in a Grove where pre-con already trades at $3,000/sqft.

• Miami-Dade has collected the half-penny transit tax since 2002 and delivered one of six promised corridors — a bus line, not rail. The next, up 27th Avenue, ballooned from $1.9B to $4.7B with a 2036 ETA.

Mana Mañana’s Day is Now

Moishe Mana’s résumé reads like a Miami fever dream: a 1983 moving truck in New York that became one of New York’s largest movers, then warehousing, computer storage back when it was just called information technology, art storage, and — per a 2022 Miami Herald profile — a mango-and-lime operation in Colombia that earned him the nickname “the Mango Man.” He planted his flag in Wynwood in 2009 and started assembling Flagler Street around 2014. Today he controls roughly 80 buildings along the zero street of Miami’s grid.

The appreciation has been spectacular. Both sides denied the rumored $700M Griffin deal for the Wynwood holdings, but we can’t ignore the potential for a generational payday — and Griffin bought a Class A Wynwood office building the same week. Meanwhile, Mana’s built legacy is a convention center he got for a song and a lot of vacant dirt. The city’s excuse just expired: the $40M, five-block Flagler streetscape is finally “done,” per Mayor Eileen Higgins. Peter’s advice for a man north of 70 talking legacy: stop soloing. JV, divvy up parcels, be the chief.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Reverter Schmeverter

In 1974, the original Allen Morris — who put the first office tower on Brickell Avenue — donated a park to the City of Miami with a reverter clause: use it for anything commercial and it goes back to the Morris organization. The city later handed a piece to Perricone’s for outdoor seating. Commercial use. Clause clicked. Fifty-one years on, the family can take its dirt back, and Brickell is furious at the wrong party.

Let me remind you the old tale of the scorpion and the frog. Morris is a developer — stinging is the job description. The outrage belongs with the administrators who agreed to terms and ignored them. The likely endgame: a third tower for Spencer Morris, generation now, already building Ponce Park in the Gables and Ziggurat in the Grove. Three on the board and you’re legit.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Brickell Needs its Own Brand

London’s bankers have worked Lombard Street since the 13th century, and New York never called itself the Lombard Street of the Americas. Yet Miami keeps calling Brickell the Wall Street of the South — a slogan that, per Christopher Knowlton’s “Bubble in the Sun,” dates to the 1920s boom, which did not end well.

The headcount doesn’t back it either. Business Insider’s Bradley Saacks reports eight of the biggest multi-strategy funds — Millennium, Citadel, Point72 included — employed a combined 218 investment professionals here in 2025. Past guest Rob Amoruso said it plainly: he can do 20 meetings on foot in Midtown; impossible here. People come in January for the lifestyle. Nobody’s partying on a boat in London.

Credit where due: Griffin is building offices on a bayfront Brickell lot that could sell out north of $1B as condos, because he wants a financial center more than a payday. If local developers want durable brand equity, take the sushi-chef approach: put your name on the building and stand behind it. Where’s the Colombo Building, the Morris Towers, the Pérez?

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Miami City Hall Blues

Miami City Hall — the old Pan Am seaplane terminal at Dinner Key — is the best-located city hall in America, on the bay in a Coconut Grove where pre-con at the Four Seasons is pushing past $3,000/sqft. Naturally, the plan is to move it next to the airport at Mel Reese. Call me cynical, conspiratorial, even, but it smells like the Mas-Beckham group couldn’t lease its commercial space out there; municipal anchor tenant with a century long lease solves that.

A property-tax referendum looms, the budget hole is coming, and City Hall sits on 15–20 waterfront acres of obsolete surface parking, the old convention center site, and the building itself. Peter’s spitball: five tower sites at $150–200M each — call it $1B in dirt — and with the Grove carved out of rapid-transit density, it’s ultra-luxury by default: $4,000–5,000/sqft, Vita-style $5M+ doors. Preserve the historic terminal, wrap towers around it, and lease long-term rather than sell, since city land sales over $500K need voter approval. Bayshore buyers told this was the Grove’s last waterfront: our condolences.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

Putting the Upzoning Cart Before the Transit Horse

Miami-Dade passed the half-penny transit sales tax in 2002 under Alex Penelas, promising six SMART corridors. We got one, it opened last year, and it isn’t rail — it’s bus rapid transit down South Dixie. The northern corridor up 27th Avenue has ballooned from $1.9B to $4.7B with a 2036 ETA.

Now the county is upzoning those corridors through Rapid Transit Zoning — championed by Commissioners Regalado and Gilbert — because federal money requires density. Kendall, already drowning in traffic, asks the obvious question: upzoning today for a train arriving when, 2075?

Why do we need federal funds at all? The half-penny was supposed to be the money.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

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• 364 workforce housing units are coming to the Pine Villa Elementary site in Goulds on a 99-year school district lease with teacher priority — while Broward just opened the school year down 7,000 students.

• 5,175 condos and HOAs sit on Fannie Mae’s unpublished national ineligibility list — 1,438 (28%) in Florida, roughly 700 in the Tri-County — before the August 3rd full-review rules even kicked off.

• $240M was the headline on First Presbyterian’s Brickell deal; the actual structure was $48M cash plus a 15% rev-share on condo sales at the incoming Nobu tower.

• $54M bought Vladislav Doronin the Jesuits’ Edgewater assemblage a decade ago; June’s $43.1M sale to Kushner Companies leaves his bayfront half-acre at a roughly $10M basis, and Harvey Hernandez ran the same play on the river: $50M in, $50M out.

No CU, No Problem

The Club at Brickell Bay — 643 units at 1200 Brickell Bay Drive — became one of the highest-grossing short-term rental buildings in the city of Miami.

The building has always been a rental cash cow — Tibor Hollo’s famously open-ended condo declaration saw to that, through Great Recession foreclosures and $2,000-a-day porn shoots. Now cease-and-desists are landing and Commissioner Damian Pardo is involved, though complaining owners were supposedly told to go call Help Me Howard. The city has a glut of inspectors and enforcement is complaint-driven.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

Teachers Need Housing Too

The school board signed a 99-year lease at Pine Villa Elementary on 216th St., handing a multi-acre slice of campus to Atlantic Pacific for 364 workforce units with teacher’s getting priority to lease. The school keeps 10-plus acres. It seems like a good idea… you can’t expect a decent lesson plan from someone commuting in from 30 miles away, and the last “precedent” — 10 units for educators in Brickell — cost more in press release fees than in construction.

While this looks like a step in the right direction (larger teacher focused product), Peter has a point regarding location. Build teacher housing where teachers actually can’t afford to live — the elementary at Coral Way and South Miami Avenue, or Eneida M. Hartner Elementary in Wynwood, both sitting on spare dirt. Meanwhile Broward opened the school year down 7,000 students as charters siphon enrollment, which sets up his Trojan horse scenario: build the apartments, watch the school close, and suddenly it’s market-rate.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

The Market Will Fix The Condo Reserves

As of Monday, August 3rd, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac killed limited review. Your buyer’s lender now underwrites the building, not just the borrower. The unpublished ineligibility blacklist — the one that leaked to a Boston attorney your lender has to email — already held 5,175 condos and HOAs nationwide. 1,438 of them, 28%, are in Florida, and roughly 700 are in the Tri-County. We’re #1!

It tightens further: Lender Letter LL-2026-03 requires buildings to hold 15% of their operating budget in reserves starting January 4th, or join your neighboring non-compliant building on the naughty list. This is all a result of the tragedy in Surfside in 2021 — 98 lives at Champlain Towers produced some way overdue condo laws, but Tallahassee’s enforcement still hasn’t lost its baby teeth, and many many many building still haven’t submitted audited financials or funded reserves to the required amounts. Now, the market will do the enforcing: non-warrantable means buyers are going to have to come in with cash or hard money (private loans at 8-9%+). Cash wants a discount, and Peter likes to say that four discounted closings recalibrate a whole building’s comps. With under 23,000 units listed Tri-County and de-listed sellers planning a post-election November return, the real repercussions will land next spring.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Ll 2026 03

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Thou Shall Not Build A Building If We Don’t Like It

First Presbyterian on Brickell sold its site in 2021 for what The Real Deal valued at $240M. The fine print on it: $48M cash plus a 15% rev-share on condo sales, among other things — priced in 2021 dollars, growing with every pre-con bump at the Nobu-branded tower from 13th Floor Investments and Key International. The church stays; the underused bayfront piece gets the tower.

Icon Brickell II’s association and the Brickell Homeowners Association say they were denied their input window. The commission waved it through, and the Urban Development Review Board approved it over a single dissent — the same day it blessed Vladislav Doronin’s Lilli in Edgewater. Peter is calling it a shakedown. The associations want Brickell Park spruced up, a settlement gets paid, everyone goes away.

Church-to-condo is a Miami genre at this point — PMG moved the Methodists into The Elser, Trinity Episcopal dealt with Key International, and the Christian Science congregation’s 1925 landmark traded at $6.25M, then $14M, then $20M.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Sell The Dirt, Fix The Basis

Two developers just ran the oldest de-risking play in the book. Harvey Hernandez bought his riverfront assemblage for about $50M in 2021, put Lofty and The Standard Brickell on it, and sold the last parcel — 300 feet of river frontage meant for tower three — to Jay Roberts and his European partner Versluys for $50M. Newgard and Two Roads’ basis on the first two buildings’ dirt: effectively nothing.

In Edgewater, Vladislav Doronin paid the Jesuits $54M a decade ago, built Missoni Baia, and in June sold everything but half an acre to Kushner Companies for $43.1M, with Cain International on both sides of the trade. That leaves Lilli’s bayfront half-acre at a roughly $11M basis. Talk about a Narnia-like basis — it doesn’t exist in 2026.

Peter’s history lesson: next month marks 100 years since the September 18, 1926 hurricane ended the land boom, and Fisher, Merrick, and Mizner all doubled down instead of cashing out. Merrick finished as a postmaster. The sellers here know that history… right? (here’s a link if you wanna send them a copy of Bubble in the Sun).

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• Amendment 3 raises the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 and eventually $250,000 — and takes roughly $1.4 billion out of Miami-Dade, $1.2 billion out of Broward, and $1 billion out of Palm Beach.

• Florida homeowners average about $8,000 a year on property insurance; Miami-Dade runs $12,000 and Monroe $15,000, against second-place Louisiana at $5,000. Citizens shed roughly a million policies after peaking near 1.3 million in 2023.

• Fisher Island has 36 condos listed, 21 of them at least 30 years old, and zero pending sales. Asks have slid from about $3,100 a foot in late April to $2,800.

• Robert Rivani bought 200 South Pointe for roughly $11.5 million in 2022, signed Catch to a 15-year lease, and traded it for $28.2 million this January. He just bought the China Grill building for $30 million.

• Villa Miami is asking $2,000 a foot in Edgewater, where entrances get built on the second floor because of flooding — and where the king tide runs August 11 through 14.

FL Sheriffs Side Against Property Tax Cuts

The Florida Sheriffs Association came out against Amendment 3, warning it “potentially allows Tallahassee to control your local budgets” and stretches law enforcement response times. The measure lifts the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000, then to $250,000. Fine, until you ask where municipalities actually get their money.

Miami-Dade takes the biggest raw-dollar hit in the state, and Dade already ran a $400 million shortfall last year. The bill promises to protect “core services,” which is at best a nebulous term. Jackson is funded with property tax dollars. So is stormwater removal, in a city that floods on a clear Tuesday.

The day after the sheriffs’ statement, Tallahassee circuit judge David Frank ruled the ballot title reads more like a political slogan and gave the AG ten days to rewrite it. Peter’s a renter voting no — he’d rather have imperfect local politicians spending the money than a legislature that meets 60 days a year. He also thinks it passes regardless.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Insurance Is The Problem

Everything else is a distraction. We pay roughly 3x the national average. Florida averages about $8,000 a year, Miami-Dade $12,000, Monroe $15,000. Second-worst state in the country is Louisiana at $5,000.

Citizens — Florida’s insurer of last resort — peaked near 1.3 million policies in 2023 and has since pushed about a million of them off the books, aided by two dozen-plus new private carriers admitted into the market on a famously low bar. I was one of the depopulated. My premium tripled.

This is where condo owners get hit twice. Per FirstService Residential, a Miami-Dade high-rise runs about $1.15 a foot per month in maintenance, Broward $1.02 — and roughly 22% of that is insurance. Peter’s point: lower the premium and the maintenance fee follows. Compare what you get for your property tax dollar against what you get for your insurance dollar and the tax bill starts looking like a bargain.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Bay Area Eats Fisher Island’s Expensive Lunch

Atherton, California — ZIP 94027, about 7,000 residents — took the most expensive ZIP code crown back from Fisher Island with a median near $10 million. Honest caveat: these are tiny samples. A dozen closings isn’t a market. But why is this happening? I’d like to think that AI deal flow lives on Sand Hill Road, and the people getting rich off it are paying California taxes to stay close to it; think of it like country club dues… and California is easier to get into than La Gorce or Indian Creek.

Peter’s numbers are less kind. Thirty-six condos on the market at 33109, 21 of them at least 30 years old — 58% vintage. Pending sales: zero. Asks went $3,100 a foot at the end of April, then $3,000, $2,900, now $2,800. Vintage product slid from $2,500 to $2,300. The last pendings were back in June, around $2,000. Nobody’s buying, so the price keeps coming down.

His play isn’t a one-off unit — it’s assembling vintage doors at a discount and terminating or selling to a developer later. And the fuel terminal keeps getting uglier: the Fisher Island Community Association amended its suit alleging HRP never seriously intended to develop the site and flipped it to the most desperate buyer available. The county has eminent domain on the table and is in no hurry.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

The Beach is so Back

Robert Rivani bought 200 South Pointe for about $11.5 million in 2022, signed Catch to a 15-year lease, and traded it in January for $28.2 million. Under three years, one restaurant asset. He ran versions of the same play with the Gekko space, Rosa Negra, Wynwood Jungle, and Amara at Paraiso. This week he bought the China Grill building for $30 million — a property Peter notes once housed Playboy Latin America, which is funny, because Playboy is now anchoring Rivani’s rebranded office building.

He isn’t land banking and he doesn’t have Ken Griffin money. He’s a dealmaker who figured out that commercial real estate is a boring business in need of a cool guy. That’s how you get Class X office, padel courts on garage decks, and a tenant roster nobody else was pitching.

Peter’s counterpoint is 100 years of Miami history. Carl Fisher, George Merrick, Addison Mizner — all visionaries, all doubled down, all crapped out. Take chips off the table. What matters isn’t what you make, it’s what you leave with.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Edgewater is Too Tempting to Ignore

North of downtown, east of Wynwood, on the water’s edge — and the highest density of new construction in the city. Villa Miami, EDITION, The Cove Residences, LILLI, Aria Reserve Sky Club, HQ Residences, ELLE.

The appeal is obvious: nobody paid $200 or $300 million for a waterfront dev site here, and the views from the 40th floor are spectacular. That’s my salesy side. The rubric has more rows than that. It floods — Peter stood in kneecap-deep water at 22nd and Biscayne after Irma.

Credit Miami 21 for making the single-family assemblage possible, and the Melo family for showing up around 2001 when nobody wanted the dirt. My issue is price. At $2,000 a foot Miami offers more elsewhere, and I’m not seeing the 40%-off trades Peter keeps predicting. Sellers are still in la-la land.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• Miami is now #1 in the U.S. for cost of living relative to income: housing takes about 40% of household income (up from 35% in 2019), home values rose 79% since 2019 against 35% wage growth, plus the nation’s priciest homeowner’s insurance.

• All but roughly 100 of the 642 units at the Club at Brickell Bay run as daily-rate Airbnbs, in a 43-story tower next to a $700M land assemblage (Ken Billions’s), and city inspectors can’t enter privately owned units without owner permission.

• 4,000 golf courses opened nationally between 1986 and 2005; now Coral Gables-based Crystal Lagoons is selling 10-acre swimmable lagoons as the master-plan amenity instead, anchoring SoLé Mia condos.

• Miami approved a $243M CRA spanning roughly 3.5 square miles of Allapattah, and developer Lissette Calderon answered within days with a $175M fund, in a district where median household incomes run near $35K.

• 28 million gallons of fuel tanks powering PortMiami’s $61B-a-year, 300,000-job economy sit next to Fisher Island’s $30M mansions, while the island’s resale market shows 25–35 listings and zero pending sales.

Miami is #1 (for the cost of living)!

A new study crowned Miami #1 in the country for cost of living. Not sticker price, where New York still wins, but what it costs to live here against what you actually make. In 2019, Miami households put 35% of income toward housing; today it’s about 40%. Home values are up 79% since 2019 while wages grew 35%. We’re the most expensive homeowner’s insurance market in America and second-highest for car insurance, and running a car here is a $10–15K-a-year line item. The Economist, for balance, ranks us eighth in the U.S. for livability and 44th worldwide.

An economist Peter used to interview in his reporter days argued you can’t fully measure Miami’s economy because so much of it runs all-cash and never touches the IRS’s books. One more #1 while we’re at it: Miami-Dade led Florida in domestic outmigration last year. The leavers earn about $87K; the arrivals, about $178K. Statewide in-migration has cooled from its peak at 1,640 people a day in 2022. Bifurcated market, growing missing middle.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

What Miami Does with The Club at Brickell Bay Will Set a Precedent for STR Buildings

Porn shoots on balconies, sex in the jacuzzi, fourteen people in a studio, pot smoke everywhere. The Miami Herald has been working the Club at Brickell Bay like a dog with a bone, dubbing it Brickell’s “Animal House.” The setup: a 20-year-old, 43-story, 642-unit tower built by the late Tibor Hollo, where all but about 100 units run as daily-rate Airbnbs. A hotel, effectively, with hundreds of individual owners. Not one HOA board member is homesteaded in the building, so you’ve got benevolent dictators ruling from afar. State law preempts cities from banning short-term rentals, the condo docs allow them, and the City of Miami says it can’t enter individually owned units without permission. So: nothing happens. Next door sits a $700M assemblage courtesy of our boy Ken Billions, which is why “termination candidate” keeps coming up in polite company.

Peter’s history lesson: this was a top-three foreclosure building statewide during the Great Recession, alongside the Jade and the Vue, and STR income is its DNA. Kill the rentals and you kill the valuations. Meanwhile, the central business district is delivering thousands of units selling this exact model: 501 First just came online sold out, with 601, the E11EVEN towers, the Gale, and the Crosby behind it.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

Lagoons Are the New Golf Courses

For a hundred years, if you built a fancy community, you built a golf course. America opened about 4,000 of them between 1986 and 2005, then growth stalled: golf is expensive, snooty, and a six-hour time suck. Enter Crystal Lagoons, a homegrown Coral Gables company whose founder holds over 2,000 patents, digging 10-acre swimmable lagoons in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and South America. The economics beat grass: no irrigation, no pool chemistry, one fill plus evaporation top-offs, cheaper for the HOA, and a far bigger addressable market than tee times.

The local proof is SoLé Mia in North Miami, where Oleta Partners, the LeFrak–Turnberry JV, repositioned a former Superfund landfill around the lagoon, a UHealth medical center, and a charter school. Turnberry’s first condo tower sold at a blend around $1,000–1,200/ft, and Jackie Soffer is clearing land for tower two, probably $1,400–1,500/ft. That’s the waterfront dream at a discount. Just don’t expect a wave of these in Dade; nobody here is setting aside 10 acres of dirt for a pool. And Peter’s caveat stands: golf courses aren’t amenities anymore, they’re future development sites.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Blight Club Allapattah

The first rule of Blight Club: complain enough and somebody opens a CRA. This week the City of Miami approved a $243M community redevelopment agency for Allapattah, roughly 3.5 square miles of warehouses west of I-95 out to 27th Avenue. It’s Little Santo Domingo, laid out a century ago around the Seaboard rail terminal, which is why the streets still dead-end everywhere. The golden-retriever version of how a CRA works: freeze the baseline property taxes, borrow to fix streets and lights, and let the new development’s incremental taxes repay the debt. The catches: that baseline stays frozen for decades, so if schools and services need more, taxpayers outside the CRA pony up. And rising values displace the people already there, which is the entire point.

The bar for entry is low, too. Hit two items on a 15-point statutory rubric and you’re legally “blighted.” Lissette Calderon, the district’s development godmother, answered the news with a $175M fund aimed squarely at the neighborhood the Rubell Museum already calls home. Median household incomes here run near $35K. Peter isn’t sold on the label; he’s been eating in Allapattah for decades and never once saw blight.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Seeding “Disharmony” on Fisher Island

Fisher Island, wealthiest zip code in America with a median income around $2.5M, has a “disharmony clause” in its association rules: say naughty things about Fisher Island and you can get expelled. One member already was. That matters because the island is buried in litigation over the 28 million gallons of fuel tanks next door that power PortMiami: $61B a year in economic impact, 300,000-plus jobs, 8.5 million cruise passengers. The tanks were privately owned for a century, the county passed on buying them decade after decade, and a few years ago HRP, a Chicago group JV’d with Related and Russell Galbut, paid $180M with luxury condos in mind.

Then county COO Jimmy Morales negotiated a $400M buyout; Daniella Levine Cava rejected it; Morales resigned, PortMiami director Hydi Webb followed, and her interim replacement lasted about ten days. Peter’s read: once eminent domain enters the chat, the deal is dead. Nobody touches that site now except for pennies on the dollar, the county holds the cards, and maybe it passed on purpose, because bunker fuel remediation is a lovely thing to make somebody else’s problem. The resale market already voted: 25–35 active listings, zero pending sales. Discovery is coming for the group chats. I’m bringing popcorn.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• Hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly moved through a Miami entity handling Argentine soccer sponsorship cash — into Aventura and Sunny Isles condos, boats, jets, and $340,000 worth of spiritual guidance — per La Nación by way of the Miami Herald.

• Miami-Dade’s luxury-to-non-luxury price gap is 8.8x — $4.85 million versus $554,000 — second only to West Palm Beach and growing 14% year over year, fastest of the 49 metros Redfin tracks.

• Related Urban wants to turn county-owned affordable units at Douglas and US1 into 750 via Live Local — and because the site sits in Miami-Dade’s Rapid Transit Zone, the City of Miami doesn’t get a pass at it.

• Miami landed $20 million in federal money for a footbridge to Inter Miami’s stadium while the Underdeck — rebranded the Heritage Trail — lost $60 million in federal funding, and City Hall managed to file competing grant requests against itself.

• The $450 million public-safety bond heads to referendum after a 3–2 commission vote — roughly $800 million all-in, about $120 a year per average household, while some $127 million from the 2017 bond sits unissued.

AFA: Argentinians F*cking Around

La Nación broke it, the Miami Herald ran with it: roughly $300 million in Argentine soccer sponsorship money — Adidas, Warner Bros. Discovery — allegedly flowed through a Miami entity into condos, boats, and private jets. Luxury line items hit $16.5 million, including 17 payments of $20,000 — $340,000 — to a spiritual guide. The money touched Citi, Bank of America, JPMorgan, and PNC, months after Argentine police raided the AFA and other clubs over another $500 million or so.

The condos landed in Aventura and Sunny Isles — the same corridor perestroika-era money bought a generation ago. Same playbook, different era: the feds raided CONCACAF’s Miami Beach offices in 2015, and 2007’s suitcase scandal flew $800,000 in under diplomatic immunity. FinCEN’s targeting orders started here and in Manhattan at $1 million all-cash, fell to $300,000; a nationwide version was due this spring. Pre-construction deposits remain the soft spot — developers aren’t deputized like banks. Whoever’s money it is, the city, county, and school board clip about 2% of valuation. Everybody wins. Allegedly.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Mind the Gap

Redfin’s July report: luxury is the top 5% of sales, non-luxury the 35th-to-65th percentile. Miami-Dade’s ratio: 8.8x — median luxury at $4.85 million against $554,000 — second nationally, a hair behind West Palm Beach. The national figure is 3.6x; New York 5.5x, LA 4.9x, Portland 2.6x. And Miami’s gap grew 14% year over year — fastest of 49 metros surveyed.

Cheap condo stock drags our non-luxury median down, sure — it doesn’t explain 8.8x against Portland’s 2.6x. This does: households leaving our metro earn a median $89,000; arrivals about $178,000. Google just went from 10,000sqft. to 45,000sqft. at 1450 Brickell — at 200-250sqft. a seat, hundreds of hires who can eat the premium. Up top, $14 million to $16 million is a rounding error.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Coconut Grove isn’t just for the ultra-wealthy

The Grove the Wall Street Journal covers — Larry Page, Ken Griffin, LLCs nobody can name — has a northwest corner the Journal skips. At Douglas and US 1, Related Urban — Albert Milo running Jorge Pérez’s affordable arm — wants Live Local to turn 162 county-owned units at Stirrup Plaza into 750.

The fun part: last month the city commission told its attorney to fight Live Local however possible. This project doesn’t care — Live Local 4.0 is aggressively pro-developer, and the site sits in Miami-Dade’s Rapid Transit Zone. County turf; the city doesn’t get a vote.

Two blocks over is West Grove — Little Bahamas, built by the Bahamians who built South Florida when a skin-color ordinance kept them away from the water. The neighborhood that absorbed Merrick Manor’s relocated trolley depot — and the Old Smokey toxic-parks fight — now has new townhomes at $1,000 a foot and Grand Avenue one-bedrooms asking $5 a foot. Peter reads a condo shop peddling workforce product as a tell on condos.

Is the Grove for everybody else? Not at this land basis — the city carved the Grove out of its own transit-station upzoning despite fixed rail within a mile. Without Live Local, this never pencils.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Bridge Over Olive Branch

Eileen Higgins said she had clout in DC, and came home with $20 million — for a footbridge from the Miami Intermodal Center to Inter Miami’s new stadium (the one named for a Brazilian fintech) on the megadevelopment that’s also taking City Hall.

Meanwhile the Underdeck — rebranded the Heritage Trail after the feds pulled its $60 million over DEI; the rename changed nothing — is still out the money. Commissioner Christine King had a grant request pending for it when the city fired its competing ask at the same government. Golden age of interconnectivity, and our administrators can’t operate a shared calendar.

Peter’s cut is sharper: transit was the whole justification for the stadium site, the bridge was supposed to open with it, and today the MIC walk is a meander past an aging Radisson. Why didn’t Beckham, Messi, and Jorge Mas write the check? They did, says Peter — they got Higgins elected. She out-raised Emilio González ten-to-one with developers. The Heritage Trail also runs past the E11EVEN Residences towers and Michael Simkins’s half-billion-dollar assemblage — hence Peter’s five-D-chess theory: Higgins is squeezing Simkins to fund the trail himself. Sponsored by E11EVEN. Plenty of heritage there.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Safe and Ready: Buy Now, Pay $800 Million Later

Higgins again — this time asking the commission for a $450 million public-safety bond: $300 million for a police headquarters, $150 million for deteriorating fire stations. King and Damian Pardo voted no; 3–2 sends it to referendum.

The homework: per January’s commission presentation, CFO Erica Paschal reported roughly $127 million of the 2017 bond’s $400 million still unissued. New debt at today’s rates with that on the shelf is a choice. Also that week: Miami-Dade torched $32,000 in non-refundable travel, canceling a 20-to-30-person DC trip over “potential political unrest” around the Raúl Castro indictment announcement — unrest that Daniel, a Cuban American, first heard about from the county’s press shop. Different government, same wallet.

Peter’s math (assist: Gemini): repayment rides on property taxes — roughly $800 million all-in, about $120 a year per average household — the same cycle a proposal would jump homestead exemptions from $50,000 to $250,000. His alternative: a police HQ doesn’t need downtown dirt — put it at Melreese by the stadium, TGK right there, and sell the downtown site. It’s the land, stupid.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

Book a Buyer / Seller Consultation

• The fastest Grove Isle closings of the past six months took 7-14 days at or near ask.

• 1 Grove Isle, at the far southern end of the island from Vita, holds the top prices: a median of $939 a foot and a high of $1,236. The lines that face Vita closed as low as $579.

• The view drives the discount. 1 Grove Isle sells its even lines in 8-9 days at full price. At 3 Grove Isle, those same even lines face Vita and sit for 6-7 months.

• 14 units sit on the market now, $975,000 to $7.5 million, 4 of them discounted and 1 listed for 305 days. The towers date to 1979 through 1981, and owners pay $2,200 to $7,600 a month before any special assessment.

Two 1,882-square-foot two-bedrooms sold this spring in the 3 Grove Isle tower. The one with a water view sold in seven days at $871 a foot, close to ask. The one that faces the back of the new Vita building needed 180 days and a price cut to find a buyer. The two sit in the same building and share a floor plan. They differ in the direction the windows point, and the Vita-facing seller paid for that difference with six months and a discount.

Grove Isle is a private 20-acre island in the bay off Coconut Grove, and a single bridge ties it to the mainland. Developers built three towers there between 1979 and 1981, at 1, 2, and 3 Grove Isle Drive. Late last year Ugo Colombo and his CMC Group finished a fourth, Vita, at 5 Grove Isle Drive: 65 residences with prices from $6.5 million and a penthouse asking $22 million. Vita sits next to the 3 tower. From the even-numbered units in that tower, the 02 through 10 lines, you used to see open water. Now you see the back of Colombo’s building.

The smaller lines carry the clearest discount. The 06 and 08 lines run 1,642 square feet and face Vita. C706 sold for $579 a foot after 223 days, and C1108 for $609 after 182 days, 39% below its first ask. The 02 unit, a larger three-bedroom that also faces Vita, took 227 days and closed 22% down. The two water-facing 07 units in the same tower sold for $871 and $877 a foot inside two weeks. One owner on a high floor pushed through at $893, the 18th-floor 04 line, after waiting 180 days and taking a cut for it.

Building 1 isolates the cause. It stands at the far end of the island from Vita. A910, an even-line three-bedroom, closed in eight days at full ask, $1,236 a foot and the top price on the island this period. A1106, another even line, closed in nine days. Across building 1 the median sale took eleven days at $939 a foot, with one unit lagging at 86 days. The even-number discount belongs to the 3 tower, where an even line faces the back of Vita. In building 1, where the same lines look at open water and the marina, buyers pay the island’s highest prices for them.

The live listings repeat the pattern. 14 units sit on the market across the three towers, from $975,000 to $7.5 million, at a median near $2 million. A water-facing 03 line listed this week at $903 a foot and full ask. A Vita-facing stack has sat for 137 days, and a 2-tower unit for 305 days at a price 14% below its first ask. 4 of the 14 listings carry a reduced price.

Price the exposure. A seller on a 3-tower even line should comp against the neighbor who anchored to the old water view, sat for half a year, and took the cut. The 07 unit that sold in a week is the wrong comp for them. A buyer faces one real question: the bay, or the island. A buyer who wants the bay pays for a water line or a building-1 unit and skips the lowball, because those sellers hold firm. A buyer who wants the island for less takes a 3-tower Vita-facing line, the cheapest deeded foot on Grove Isle, while other buyers stay away from the inside view.

-Daniel

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• 11,500 units are proposed for Little River between Pablo Castro’s Hue Hub (4,000 units, all workforce housing at or below 120% of AMI) and the Swerdlow family’s 7,500.

• $3 million is the reported number for Ken Griffin to take Dr. Jackson’s 1,800sqft cottage on a 6,000sqft lot — the last piece of a full Brickell block — after buying out all 138 Solaris units at a blended $875/sqft, roughly 20% over market, and terminating the condo.

• 20 years dark: the Coconut Grove Playhouse, on the National Register of Historic Places, hasn’t staged a play since roughly 2006 — and the vote to finally move its rehab plan forward was unanimous.

• 8,736 phase one and 1,575 phase two milestone inspections were completed statewide in 2024-2025 across roughly 28,000 condo associations — and only 64% of jurisdictions even reported to DBPR in 2025, while the average repair permit jumped from $337,000 to about $500,000.

• $42 million of a roughly $80 million budget is already spent on the Ludlam Trail with zero public renderings — in a county offering 2.8 acres of park per 1,000 residents against a 10-acre national average.

Little River = StuyTown South

Little River — the pocket wedged between Little Haiti, El Portal, and the actual little river just north of Lemon City — now hosts the largest proposed Live Local project in Florida. Pablo Castro’s Hue Hub calls for 4,000 units, and unlike the usual 40/60 Live Local arithmetic, all of it is workforce housing at or below 120% of AMI. Next door, the Swerdlow family wants 7,500 more. Call it 11,500 units in one small district — Stuyvesant Town NYC scale — with a $35 million Tri-Rail station as the Swerdlow Group’s developer contribution. Not a park. A train station.

Peter’s caveat is the clock — think Biscayne Landing becoming Solé Mia: a 20-year play where today you’re buying the rumor. There’s partnership litigation on the Castro side, and Magic City next door just announced its resurrection (anyone can file a press release). The neighborhood still has chickens crossing the street. People once bought Grove houses for $40,000, too.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Ken Billions is Winning at Monopoly

Ken Griffin is reportedly negotiating with the city, at around $3 million, for Dr. Jackson’s house: an 1,800sqft cottage on a 6,000sqft lot across from the Citadel headquarters site, and the last puzzle piece of a full Brickell city block. It follows the Solaris buyout, where Griffin took all 138 units at a blended $875/sqft — roughly 20% over market for a 20-year-old Harvey Hernandez building (well done, sellers) — and terminated the condo. Add the office building with 1,400 parking spaces behind it, the Tibor Hollo waterfront site ($360M+, 2022), and a $2.5 billion tower finally showing movement.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Coconut Grove Playhouse Problems

The Coconut Grove Playhouse — Charles and Main Highway, National Register of Historic Places — hasn’t staged a play since roughly 2006. It sits wrapped and propped beside a municipal surface lot in a neighborhood of $3 million houses — nobody’s idea of highest and best use. The plan shrinks the theater, keeps the historic front, and adds parking and commercial, with FIU and GableStage holding the operator’s lease. The jurisdictional quirk: it’s in Damian Pardo’s city district, but Miami-Dade Commissioner Raquel Regalado is the face of the rehab — which tells you who’s driving.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

OPPAGA is just a WHOLELOTTA Letters

OPPAGA — Florida’s Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability — put out the 2024-2025 milestone inspection report: the state’s report on all your condo reports. Florida has roughly 28,000 condo associations and 1.6 million units, roughly half of them in tri-county South Florida. Against a January 1, 2025 deadline, the state logged 8,736 phase one inspections and 1,575 phase twos in two years — and DBPR heard from 71% of jurisdictions in 2024, falling to 64% in 2025. Everything we’ve seen is self-reported and unaudited. We pull condo financials constantly: no liens, no fines, no enforcement.

Opagga Report

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The real enforcer is insurance. Post-Surfside, some building premiums doubled — $200,000 to $400,000 a year — and for buildings actually doing the work, they’re finally coming down. The market is grading homework the state won’t. Phase two findings produced 903 repair permit applications, average value jumping from $337,000 in 2024 to roughly half a million in 2025, ranging from $25,000 to $30 million. The condo cliff isn’t identifying problems; it’s which associations can fund the fix.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Ludlam Trail(ess)

The Ludlam Trail is five-ish miles of dead rail corridor from around Dadeland up to the airport, promised a decade ago as our mini BeltLine. The county has spent $42 million of a roughly $80 million budget and hasn’t shown the public one rendering — in a city that rendered a $60 million Underdeck park it isn’t building. The official explanation cites permitting, environmental issues, and the fact that a railroad once owned the property. That was also true when they bought it.

Why care if you don’t bike: Miami-Dade offers 2.8 acres of park per 1,000 residents against a 10-acre national average — the City of Miami sits at 3.6 and once tried counting condo pool decks — per a county report Peter had his AI dig up. Finished trails raise surrounding values, which anyone collecting roughly 2% a year in property taxes should find motivating. Tie the south end into the Underline and you could ride from A.D. Barnes Park to Brickell.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• $100 — that’s what CIM Group paid at auction for the Good Time Hotel after foreclosing on its own ~$200 million loan, as coastal Florida hotels pay up to 100% higher insurance premiums than inland comps.

• $77 million — what Ken Griffin paid Related for 3.7 acres on Terminal Island, where he now wants a helipad because the bay is too shallow to park his 308-foot yacht.

• 95% — the share of slip profits David Martin’s Terra would keep under the Virginia Key marina lease.

• $7.6 billion — the funding gap in Miami-Dade’s SMART transit program per Mayor Levine Cava’s memo, roughly $380 million a year for 20 years the county doesn’t have.

Worst Time for The Good Time

The Good Time Hotel on Washington opened in summer 2021 with David Grutman and Pharrell Williams out front, back when Miami had some of the only open bars in America. Then the rest of the country reopened, the spring break crackdown swung the pendulum hard the other way, and the party found other zip codes. Grutman and Pharrell exited in 2024; without them it was just another vanilla hotel Miami Beach. Latest chapter: lender CIM Group foreclosed on a roughly $200 million loan, took it to auction, and — as the only bidder — bought it for a hundred bucks. They still eat the debt.

This isn’t a one-off. The W is closing next month to become a Waldorf. Add the Z Ocean, the Gabriel South Beach, the Fairwind at 1000 Collins, the condo-hotel at 6060 Indian Creek, the Raleigh (Michael Shvo out, Nahla Capital in), and the Deuville — still a plot of sand at 67th and Collins. When coastal hotels pay up to double the insurance of inland comps, missing your RevPAR projections means running grocery-store margins on the beach.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Miami will become a Chopper Town

Ken Billions — Ken Griffin, for the newcomers — paid $77 million a few years back for 3.7 acres on Terminal Island, bought from Related Group. See, the problem is that Old Man Carl Fisher wasn’t dredging for superyachts back in the 1920s. This is a hardly a problem if you have deep enough pockets to build your own marina. So now Griffin wants a helipad, and he’s not alone — One Thousand Museum, the Anatara, Villa Miami, Aston Martin Residences, and E11EVEN Residences Beyond have all put helipads in the marketing deck.

If the Beach signs off for Griffin, what stops every Star Island and Indian Creek neighbor from filing next?

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Marinamania

The Miami Seaquarium is dead — its operator, The Dolphin Company, went bankrupt — and David Martin’s Terra picked up the county lease on Virginia Key for a cool $22.5M. The filed plans: a marina. The catch is physics. That pale blue water around the site is pale because it’s shallow, and big boats draft deep, which means dredging, which means DERM, which means Key Biscayne residents who liked their empty aquarium just fine.

The math is seductive. Marinas charge $25–60 a foot; a 200-footer at $60 is $12,000 a month, and 80-plus big slips pencil to roughly a million a month — with Martin keeping 95% of slip profits under the lease. And demand is real: Florida had 1.2 million registered boats in 2024, 10% of the national total, with multi-year waitlists at local marinas. Peter’s counter: the 40–70 foot yacht segment has flipped to a buyer’s market, Terra has never been stress-tested through a downturn, and the 1920s land boom buried every developer who kept doubling down — Merrick, Mizner, and Fisher included.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

Miami Dade’s Public Transit Priority

Nearly a quarter century ago, under Mayor Alex Penelas, we voted ourselves a half-penny sales tax to fund six new transit corridors. The scorecard: one delivered — the South Dade rapid bus corridor, which just came online. The northeast corridor to Aventura, the Beach connection, the full east-west line to FIU, the Kendall corridor: nothing. Mayor Levine Cava’s own memo says the county is $7.6 billion short — call it $380 million a year for 20 years.

And the money isn’t coming. The county just closed a nearly half a billion dollar budget gap, there’s a $450M bond getting floated around Miami City Hall, eminent domain talk around the Fisher Island fuel terminals, and a property tax referendum in November that could gut the budgets funding everything down to Jackson Hospital. Gun to the county’s head, the $61 billion port wins every time. This was never the priority.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Smart Plan Miami Dade County

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Live Local 4.0 - The G(r)ift that Keeps on Giving

Quick refresher: make 40% of your units workforce housing (tenants at up to 120% of area median income) and Live Local lets you build higher and denser by right, tax abatement included, no matter what the local commission thinks. The 4.0 wrinkle is the lawyers’ full employment act: if a municipality treats an affordable project differently than a market-rate one, an “aggrieved person” — read: developer — can now pursue punitive damages, uncapped. The City of Miami just directed its highest-paid employee, the city attorney, to find ways to Live Local-proof the city. Good luck!

Doral found the nuclear football in 2025: facing the 630-unit Oasis at Doral, it dropped a six-month moratorium on everybody — treat every project equally badly and there’s no discrimination to sue over. Peter sees a cottage industry coming: file, get rejected, sue, settle, repeat. Bigger picture, this is Tallahassee vacuuming power out of city halls, one preemption at a time.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• 9 forged ballots, 17 that managers couldn’t validate, and 25 mailed the same day with the same postmark — that’s what a state monitor found at the Club at Brickell Bay Drive, where forging a condo vote is now a third-degree felony (5 years, $5,000) under Florida’s post-Surfside reforms.

• 30 years and ~100 jobs out the door: Hard Rock Cafe is exiting Bayside via a federal WARN notice and the city won’t renew — even though the ground lease (an Ashkenazy/Brookfield JV) runs to 2060 with options to 2113 and CBD retail sits near $53/sqft.

• 52% of Miami pre-construction sales now go to international buyers (up from 48% last year), 85% of them Latin American

• Donated in 1958 with a reverter clause, Coral Gables’s War Memorial Youth Center snaps back to its donor association if the city changes its name or use, and the city just backed off touching it.

• ~80 permitted Live Local projects sit in Miami’s pipeline but only 2 have shovels in the ground — and the City Commission directed the City Attorney to fight SB 102, the 2023 law letting workforce housing projects skip local zoning and public hearings.

Can’t Spell Fiduciary without ‘Fraud’

The Club at Brickell Bay Drive is one of those Airbnb-friendly towers Tibor Hollo built ahead of the curve around 2005. This June, a state monitor sat in the social room and FaceTimed owners to ask whether the signatures on their ballots were real.

A lot weren’t: 9 documented forgeries, 17 the managers couldn’t validate, 25 mailed the same day with the same postmark, and one owner’s name misspelled on his own ballot. The eight-term president — who happens to run six Airbnbs in the building — got voted out. Post-Surfside, forging a condo ballot is a third-degree felony now, and the state will actually send a monitor. A 2016 Herald investigation pegged 30% of Miami-Dade condo communities as having faced fraud complaints. This is just the one that made the news. Buying a condo here? Pull the minutes and see who controls the proxies.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Hard Rock Lease Lapse is the Beginning of a Domino Effect at Bayside

Hard Rock Cafe is leaving Bayside after 30 years, taking about 100 jobs — we only found out because they filed a federal WARN notice, and the city isn’t renewing. What’s odd: Bayside is an Ashkenazy Acquisition/Brookfield JV on a city ground lease running to 2060, options out to 2113, and it’s one of the most-visited spots in South Florida. CBD retail rents sit near $53/sqft, and they’re more than doubling the footprint over the next few years.

So why walk? Hard Rock was in arrears during the pandemic and has feuded with the city for years — but when a tenant this entrenched quits a cash cow, it usually means there’s something we can’t see yet coming. The site’s screaming for a better use than t-shirt shops and go-fast boat rides — a museum, a cultural center, anything. I don’t buy the domino theory: Bayside’s actually upgrading its tenant mix (the old Hooters is now a local sports bar). Peter’s waiting for the shoe to drop.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Hold 🟨

Alcatraz Closed + American Citizen Becomes President in Colombia = More Condos to Int’l Buyers

Two stories pulling opposite directions. Miami Realtors’ chairman likes to say that when Latin America lurches left, money flows to Miami. Colombia just did the opposite — electing a Trump-aligned, U.S.-citizen president (Pine Crest address, kids born here, won by under 1%) over outgoing Gustavo Petro, with Marco Rubio reportedly among the first to call. If Colombia’s headed for go-go days, why park capital here? Cutting the other way: Alligator Alcatraz — the 20,000-detainee camp on 17,000 acres of wetland, where 40% of Florida’s ICE arrests landed — is officially closed, with Mayor Levine Cava eyeing the National Park Service. Less deportation theater, lower deterrent.

Meanwhile international buyers hit 52% of pre-construction sales (up from 48%), 85% Latin American — even as condo values fell roughly 10% in 2025 and new Fannie/Freddie rules push reserves to 15%. Most of that money isn’t relocating here; it’s buying financial security. Net effect on demand? Genuinely murky.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Coral Gables Walks Back Over Youth Center; It Should Stay There

Right in my backyard. The War Memorial Youth Center — George Merrick’s old turf, about an eighth the size of the Granada Golf Course — was donated to Coral Gables in 1958 with a reverter clause: change the name or the use, and it reverts to the donor association. The city floated modernizing it, then backed off; Vice Mayor Rhonda Anderson’s resolution tells the manager not to run any renovation that would force a temporary closure. The wrinkle: the city argues the association lapsed and is invalid — but if it does revert, nothing in the docs restricts the use, so the association could just redevelop it themselves. Two commissioners are calling the whole thing political retaliation and a vendetta, and an anonymous Gables blog got cited to launch a formal investigation. A charter school, Somerset Academy, across the street keeps getting floated as the compromise. This is a small-town feud with big bank accounts and a lot of lawyers. Should it stay a youth center? Absolutely.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Call the Whambulance for Commissioners Crying Over Live Local

The Miami City Commission voted unanimously to go hunting for ways to fight the state’s Live Local Act — and the irony’s thick, since the guy leading it, Damian Pardo, helped open the density floodgates not long ago. The resolution, co-sponsored by chair Christine King, directs city attorney George Wysong — the city’s highest-paid employee — to study every angle: home rule, due process, preemption, unfunded mandates. No lawsuit yet. Live Local (SB 102, signed in 2023) lets a project reserving 40% of its units as affordable for 30 years blow past local density, height, and use limits on commercial, industrial, and mixed-use land, skip public hearings, and grab tax breaks — and Tallahassee strengthens it yearly, now letting the winning side recover attorney’s fees (good luck suing). There are 80 permitted Live Local projects here; just 2 are under construction. Translation: commissioners are losing the one thing they actually sell — the power to say yes or no. You had your shot. Let ‘em whine.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Catch the Next Episode

We’re live every Friday at 4pm on Substack and YouTube. Come hang, yell at your screen, or send us a topic you want us to debate.

-Daniel
📍 Realtor @ Compass
🎙️ Co-host, Buy, Sell, Hold: Miami

• The Real Deal reports Related Group and David Martin’s Terra are in talks to buy out the St. Louis — 134 units at 800 Claughton Island Drive, built 1995 — at a rumored ~$1.5 million a door, roughly $200 million, which would be the first condo termination in Brickell Key history. Both firms declined to comment and nothing’s signed, so treat “the St. Louis is being terminated” as an unconfirmed rumor, not a done deal.

• The math behind it: Swire just presold Mandarin penthouses at a record $6,300/sqft. The island’s older towers resell for $400–$520/sqft.

• By the numbers, the next likeliest candidates are the oldest, cheapest-per-foot buildings: Brickell Key One (1982, $407), Isola (1990, $476), and Brickell Key II (1991, $517).

A one-bedroom at Brickell Key One trades for about $407 a foot. The penthouses Swire just presold two seawalls over went for $6,300. Same island, same water, same skyline — and a fifteen-fold gap between what the old dirt is worth standing up and what it’s worth flattened. On a man-made island that hasn’t seen a new condo since Asia topped off in 2008, that gap is the only place left to build.

Which brings us to the St. Louis. The Real Deal reported in April that the Pérez family’s Related Group and David Martin’s Terra are negotiating a buyout of the 134-unit tower at 800 Claughton Island Drive — built 1995, 2-4 bedrooms — with a group representing nearly 80 percent of owners. The figure making the rounds is $1.5 million a door, around $200 million for the building. Both firms declined to comment, and nothing has been signed, so file the whole thing under rumor for now. But the reporting lines up with what those owners have reportedly been doing for two years: entertaining bulk offers. (The implosion that sent debris through their lobby in April probably didn’t make anyone love the condo-board life more.)

(Below: watch the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Brickell Key get imploded.)

If it closes, it’ll be the the first termination Brickell Key has ever seen. It probably won’t be the last.

Here’s the developer’s checklist, roughly: waterfront, permissive big-city zoning, an aging building, and — the one that actually decides it — a low enough vote threshold to dissolve an association. On Brickell Key the first three are a given. Every tower sits on the bay, one bridge from Brickell, inside the City of Miami, where you can build dense. So the whole game collapses to two variables we can actually measure: how old, and how cheap per foot.

Plot the island and the candidates land in the bottom-left like they were dropped there. Brickell Key One — built 1982, the oldest tower on the Key and already past its 40-year recertification — closes around $407 a foot, the cheapest on the island. Isola (1990) and Brickell Key II (1991) sit right behind it at $476 and $517.

Now run the assembly math. Pay $1.5 million a door across the St. Louis’s 134 units and you’re $200 million into a building. Sounds insane until you remember the comps a stone’s throw away at Swire’s Mandarin Oriental.

The reason the St. Louis is the first domino isn’t that it’s the oldest or the cheapest — it’s neither. It’s the paperwork. Pull the building’s recorded 1996 declaration and there it is in Article 20: termination takes a vote of 80% of owners, and a group that size is supposedly already at the table. A different tower from 1982 tower trading at $407 is a perfect target on paper and a dead letter if its bylaws demand 95% percent and nine owners say no (just ask the guys trying to get The Edition Residences built over in Edgewater). Buyouts don’t die on price. They die on the holdouts.

So watch the older towers — but watch their HOA budgets and their reserve studies harder than their listing prices. The building that terminates next won’t be the one developers want most. It’ll be the one whose owners are tiredest: the special assessment that lands wrong, the SIRS number nobody wants to fund, the board that’ll finally put an offer to a vote. On Brickell Key the wrecking ball follows the path of least resistance, and right now that path runs straight through the oldest, cheapest, most assessment-weary buildings on the island.

Swire needed years and a controlled implosion to clear one hotel for its towers. The next developer won’t need dynamite. They’ll need 80%, 90%, or more of a 1980s condo board to sign off + a check with a lot of zeros.

-Daniel

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• Brickell Key closed 69 condo sales over the last six months, about $51 million, and none of them closed at or above ask.

• The cheap buildings carried the sub-market. Isola and Brickell Key II, the two least expensive, closed 27 of the 69 sales, or 39% of all activity.

• Carbonell ($926/sqft) and Two Tequesta Point ($796) drew the strongest closings, while the islandwide median ran about $557/sqft.

Asia has a $20M penthouse on the market. Over the last six months, the building closed one condo. That sale was a $234-a-foot public-records transfer, the kind of price you see when money moves between two people who know each other.

The headlines say the island is booming. Swire imploded the old Mandarin Oriental on April 12 to clear room for a $1.3 billion two-tower replacement, and it has presold penthouses at $6,300 a foot. Related and David Martin’s Terra are circling the St. Louis at 800 Claughton Island for a buyout that could top $200 million, the first condo termination this island has seen.

Start with who trades. Isola and Brickell Key II, the two cheapest buildings on the island and both early-1990s towers, closed 27 of the 69 sales, or 39% of all activity off the bottom shelf. Carbonell closed nine, the Tequesta towers a handful each, and Asia logged its one ghost transfer.

Measured as months of supply, which divides active listings by the recent sales pace, the island splits in two.

Isola clears its inventory in about two months, the Courts in four. Climb the price ladder and the buyers disappear. Asia sits on 96 months of supply, Three Tequesta Point on 39. A building that lists thirteen units and closes two produces a number like that.

No building closed at or above ask. The median Three Tequesta deal landed 14% under its last list price, Brickell Key II 12% under. Even the Courts, the tightest building on the island, gave back 4%.

Buyers hold the leverage here, even at the top. Carbonell closings ran a median $926 a foot, Two Tequesta Point $796, the islandwide median near $557. Strong numbers, though they describe the deals that close. Most listings above $2M sit unsold.

If you bring patience (and a pre-approval), the top of this island is the most negotiable it has been in years. The $2M+ inventory sits, and the holding costs add up: an Asia owner will write a $4,000 check to the HOA every month before flipping a light switch (or paying taxes). Each day a unit sits hands you leverage, not the seller.

Sellers keep making one mistake. The Mandarin’s $6,300 a foot and the St. Louis’s $1.5 million a door price new construction, not a 1998 condo down the seawall. An owner in a Tequesta tower reads about a record penthouse and a $200M buyout, lists at a 2022 price, waits 200 days, and closes 10% under. Sellers read those record prices and anchor to a number their unit cannot reach.

Brickell Key’s future is a billion-dollar tower and perhaps some condo terminations. Its present is a $20 million penthouse with no buyer and a one-bedroom in Isola that sold in eight weeks. For a deal on the island, skip the new towers and shop the listings that have been sitting.

-Daniel

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