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• 5,175 condos and HOAs sit on Fannie Mae’s unpublished national ineligibility list — 1,438 (28%) in Florida, roughly 700 in the Tri-County — before the August 3rd full-review rules even kicked off.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

Schedule a Buyer / Seller Consultation

What makes him interesting here isn’t the résumé. It’s that he’s running on the exact crisis we trade on every week — a cost of living that’s already pushed his own daughters away from home. So we handed him five topics and made him call them.

TL;DR

• Eliott Rodriguez logged 48 years in journalism — 25 as CBS4 Miami’s main anchor — before launching a March 2026 congressional run in Florida’s 27th against Maria Elvira Salazar.

• The Live Local Act has roughly 43,400 housing units in the statewide pipeline, nearly half earmarked for Miami-Dade — even as the tri-county region lost about 67,000 residents year-over-year (July 2024–July 2025).

• The foreign-buyer share of new-construction South Florida condos climbed from 49% to 52% across 2025 while Alligator Alcatraz dominated headlines — and roughly 85% of those buyers came from Latin America.

• More than 40% of Miami-Dade condo buildings have already been hit with special assessments, with per-unit bills running from $20,000 to north of $400,000 in some towers.

• Miami-Dade College conveyed a 2.5-acre Biscayne Boulevard parcel — pegged on-air at north of $2 billion in built-out value — to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation for $10.

As a Matter of Fact, a Fact is a Fact

Rodriguez says he didn’t leave over money or burnout — he left over the building. CBS’s parent, Paramount, was being sold to David Ellison, son of Larry (Oracle guy), in a deal he argues the Trump administration had its fingers in: a $16 million settlement of an editing lawsuit paid to the president, an FCC sign-off, and a newsroom “overseer” he calls a censor. Colbert was fired; 60 Minutes lost three correspondents, Scott Pelley included. After 48 years, that struck him as a reasonable place to stop — until a poll told him he could actually win FL-27, and the man who built a career insisting a fact is a fact decided he’d rather legislate his way out of a crisis than curse at it from the couch.

Miami Will Become Affordable Again

The 2023 Live Local Act was supposed to be the cheat code for developers: commit to 40% workforce units and you skip the public hearings and pocket a tax abatement. In practice, Bal Harbour, Hollywood, and others are fighting it parcel by parcel — including a site Rodriguez is tracking in his own district, the old Sears on Coral Way in Coral Gate, where he grew up. His view: the units are needed, but you can’t do it piecemeal or strip every zoning call from cities that know their own blocks. A developer’s counter is: most local administrators don’t know a thing about real estate. Impede the deal and the builder pivots from potentially hundreds of workforce units to a handful ultra-luxury ones, because that’s where the margin sits.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Eliott: Buy 🟩

Alligator Alcatraz. So What?

The Everglades detention camp dominated national headlines all year, and foreign buyers kept buying. The new-construction foreign share rose from 49% to 52% across 2025, and roughly 85% of those buyers came from Latin America — Miami’s permanent gravitational pull. I suggest that prospective buyers are too rich to care, right up until they need someone to tend the building and park the cars. Peter’s sharper question is for the industry: a 55%-foreign-born county runs on these arrivals, so why is an association of 93,000 dues-paying Realtors silent while its own future buyers get chased off by Tallahassee? Rodriguez, the son of immigrants who’d have been swept up under today’s rules, calls the camp an abomination built with federal money that never fully arrived — roughly $58 million of a promised $608 million.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥
Eliott: Sell 🟥

Condo Towers are Safer Now

Five years after Champlain Towers South killed 98 people, the post-Surfside regime — milestone inspections, reserve studies every decade — has rewritten condo economics. More than 40% of Miami-Dade buildings have already been assessed, with bills from $20,000 to north of $400,000 a unit, and in 2025 the Legislature partly walked it back with HB 913, letting boards pause reserves and borrow. Rodriguez lives this: he sold the house, vetted a building’s reserves with Peter’s help, bought the condo anyway — and still got assessed. Peter’s read is that the rules are conceptually right but financially impossible for the people who need them most.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨
Eliott: Buy 🟩

We Love Libraries

In September, Miami-Dade College voted unanimously to convey a 2.5-acre Biscayne Boulevard parcel — next to Freedom Tower, at the mouth of PortMiami — to the Trump Presidential Library Foundation for $10. Peter ran the math the board apparently didn’t: roughly 1,000 units an acre at about $2 million a door, no parking requirement, a sellout north of $2 billion against a land basis around $368 million. County Property Appraiser Tomás Regalado pegged it at $67 million; Peter calls that a free sample, not the pie. This was supposed to be the endowment a college without one never had. Rodriguez, an MDC alum, notes that there are a number of fights against the giveaway well underway, one of which names MDC students as plantiffs. Nobody at the table objects to a Trump library in Miami — they object to handing away the best dirt downtown for an amount that can barely get you a pound of ground beef.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Hold 🟨
Eliott: 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

• Over the trailing 12 months, the median Coral Gables historic single-family home sold for about 11% more than its non-historic neighbor — and at a higher price per square foot, not a lower one.

• Designated historic homes move in roughly 35 days on average versus about 81 for everything else — less than half the time on market. The “hard to renovate” houses are the ones trading faster.

• The premium holds across every historic district I looked at: Granada historic stock ran about $928/sqft vs $789 non-historic, Country Club Section $999 vs $936, and Riviera a staggering $1,654 vs $993.

• Historic homes win the middle, not the top: non-historic averages get dragged up to roughly $3.1M because the $20M+ teardown-and-rebuild trophy market is almost entirely non-historic.

Here’s the conventional wisdom — mine included. A historic home is a liability dressed up as charm. It’s older / tired, and the second you want to touch it you’re standing in front of the Historic Preservation Board with a Certificate of Appropriateness, explaining why the windows you picked out fit the city’s aesthetic. The Gables doesn’t do “renovate it however you like.” It does Standard COAs for the small stuff and Special COAs for anything real — demolition, variances, the additions people actually want. So the logic goes: of course historic homes trade at a discount.

The closed sales say the opposite. I pulled every Coral Gables single-family sale over the last 12 months — 42 designated historic, 447 not — and the historic homes didn’t lose. They won.

Start with the midpoint, because the average lies and I’ll get to why. The median historic home sold for $2,225,000. The median non-historic home sold for $2,000,000 — a $225,000 gap at the middle of the market, or about 11% more for the designated house. And it earned that premium while being smaller: historic homes averaged roughly 12% less square footage. Less house, more money. Per foot, historic still edged ahead — about 3% higher on a median $/sqft basis.

Now let’s look at Days on Market (DOM). Historic homes went pending in an average of 35 days. Non-historic sat for 81 — more than twice as long. Whatever buyers supposedly fear about a designated property, they aren’t acting afraid. They’re acting fast.

Now the asterisk — the one you’re probably drafting a comment for already. The average non-historic home sold higher than the average historic one: about $3.89M against $3.1M. If you stopped at the average, you’d think I blew it. I didn’t. That average is a waterfront mirage. The non-historic pool contains the entire trophy belt — the eight-figure, scrape-and-rebuild glass boxes that pull the mean into the stratosphere (I trimmed both ends of the scatter — a $55M sale at the top, a $146K one at the bottom — just to keep the chart legible). The median exists precisely to throw those out. And the median favors the historic houses.

The cleaner test is to stop comparing across the city and start comparing within it. Same district, historic versus not, price per foot. In Granada — Merrick’s original village and the deepest cohort of historic sales — designated homes ran about $928/sqft against $789 for the non-historic houses on the same streets. Call it a 17.6% premium for the plaque. In the Country Club Section, $999 versus $936. In Riviera, the gap is almost comic: $1,654 historic against $993 non-historic. And before you write it off as “old houses are just charming” — nearly all of these historic sales (34 of 42) are pre-1960 stock, the 1920s and ‘30s Mediterranean Revival houses that are the entire reason why Coral Gables looks like Coral Gables.

In a city whose entire product is the streetscape — the barrel tile, the coral rock, the canopy — the regulatory pain is the moat. A Certificate of Appropriateness is an annoyance right up until it’s the reason the guy who buys the 1926 next door can’t demo it and stand up a sugar cube on your sightline. Designation doesn’t just bind your house; it freezes the four around it. And the city staples a carrot to the stick — the Miami-Dade ad-valorem historic exemption can shield the added value from a qualifying restoration from taxes for 10 years (it’s transferable, by the way). So the friction everyone prices as a liability is doing two jobs at once: protecting your block and lowering your carry. Even the non-historic homes that traded closest to land value — the bottom slice selling under $500/sqft on a normal lot — sat an average of 147 days.

I spent years agreeing that the historic designation was a tax on the owner. 42 sales, 12 months, and a higher median, a faster close, and a per-foot premium in every district later — I don’t anymore. The review board everyone treats as the cost of ownership is, in the resale math, the thing standing between your basis and the spec builder next door.

-Daniel

Coral Gables Historic Homes List

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• A ~$80M construction note (plus ~$20M accrued interest) on JDS’s stalled Mercedes-Benz tower in West Brickell got foreclosed on; the ~$2B-sellout project is ~20% sold, with Jeff Soffer rumored to buy the paper.

• The Rubells flipped an Allapattah pork-processing plant bought for $5.35M in 2021 to Lissette Calderon for $15M; Calderon has already delivered 752 units across three apartment buildings in the area.

• Ken Griffin rolled up the 137-unit Solaris (2006, 22 stories) via Delaware LLCs at ~$500K–$700K a door — an estimated $85M–$100M — across the street from the Citadel HQ construction site and two blocks from the 800-unit Panorama rental tower.

• Miami-Dade passed on the Fisher Island fuel-terminal site at a $200M ask, watched a Related-connected group buy it for $180M, walked from a rumored $400M buyout, and is now pursuing eminent domain on a port worth ~$61B/yr; two officials resigned as part of the fallout.

Soffer Swoops in at Mercedes Benz Condo Project

JDS — Michael Stern’s shop — has a problem in West Brickell: nobody’s moved a crane in months on the 791-unit Mercedes-Benz tower. Cottonwood (out of Los Angeles) picked up the ~$80M construction note (plus ~$20M in accrued interest) and foreclosed; the city piled on with its own suit over an unbuilt Firehouse No. 4 — currently run out of a trailer — and a $5M development contribution. One Sotheby’s is separately suing a JDS affiliate for ~$500K in alleged commissions.

Jeff Soffer — Aventura Mall, Fontainebleau, the family that built most of Aventura — steps in. West Brickell is a C-minus location for a Mercedes-Benz badge, but Soffer’s quiet, patient, and doesn’t get ripped off. Bet the jockey.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Buy 🟩

All in on Allapatah

The Rubells bought a pork-processing plant for $5.35M in 2021 and just sold it to Lissette Calderon for $15M — a multiple that says smart money likes this submarket. Calderon’s already delivered 752 units across three Allapattah towers leasing in the; this is phase one of a three-phase encore.

The bull case is adjacency: the Jackson/UM Health District puts nurses and salaried workers next door. The bear case is Peter’s — Allapattah is landlocked, transit-starved Little Santo Domingo, hemmed in by the river and developments that won’t let you cut through, and Little River (with Swerdlow’s workforce push) is arguably easier to get in and out of. Calderon has done it before; the open question is basis and the market she delivers into.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Hold 🟨

Sayonara Solaris

Ken Griffin keeps buying good locations at prices nobody can explain. The latest: a quiet, Delaware-LLC roll-up of a majority of the 137-unit Solaris (Harvey Hernandez, 2006, 22 stories) at roughly $500K–$700K a door — call it $85M–$100M — to bolt apartments and parking onto the office tower behind it, on the waterfront site he bought from Tibor Hollo’s group for $368M.

The problem: the 800-unit Panorama rental tower and the final prize of Brickell condo terminations, Four Ambassadors, sit a couple blocks away.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥

Delivering in Downtown

Aria just delivered 501 First — another STR (short-term-rental) building, condos with zero rental restrictions. There ~10,000 units in the central business district with ~5,000 more coming, most of doing the same thing — STR. Harvey Hernandez’s Gale/Natiivo already shows ~25% of units listed for resale; Adam Neumann’s Flow House is 75% sold. Even quality non-STR product is buried — Swire’s 2016-vintage Reach & Rise across the river is littered with inventory, and downtown’s sitting on ~24 months of supply.

The kicker is warrantability (i.e., a condo building’s ability to qualify for a conventional loan): one recently delivered building’s marketed square footage didn’t match what got built, blowing Fannie/Freddie eligibility and forcing a buyer with a 50% deposit into a hard-money loan at 8.5–10%. So — are developers delivering what they promised? Literally, yes; the buildings are going up. Buying the product is another conversation entirely.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Fisher Island is Mayor Levine Cava’s (Eminent) Domain

PortMiami is the only major port on earth without on-site fuel terminals — they sit on a private island just east of the port — the wealthiest ZIP code in the country. The owners asked $200M a couple years back; the county passed, and a Related-connected group scooped it for $180M with plans for ultra-high-end condos. Now the county needs the dirt, a rumored $400M buyout collapsed, two officials — PortMiami COO Jimmy Morales and Port Director Hydi Webb — resigned, and Mayor Levine Cava is going the eminent-domain route on an engine worth ~$61B.

Leverage sits entirely with the county: no developer wants to sit on contaminated dirt with a guillotine overhead, and even the Fisher Island Community Association is YIMBY-ing the redevelopment for its promised four-acre park. Don’t chase. Make them come to you.

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

“What about Key Biscayne?”

29 listings cleared the filter.

“But I want a front row building right there on the sand.”

This is where Key Biscayne’s market gets tricky.

Sellers are waiting out here too.

The median 2/2 on the Key has been listed 82 days — and that’s the median. Two in five are past 90; one in six past 180. The reigning champion sits at Towers of Key Biscayne: 505 days on market, still asking $798/sqft. Think it might be time to drop the price on that one…

Here’s where the Key breaks from Brickell. In Brickell, the value hides in the vintage stock — Brickell Townhouse and Brickell Place asking $589 to $681/sqft against roughly $863 for the 2016 towers (Reach and Rise at Brickell City Centre). Age buys you a discount. On Key Biscayne there’s no 2016 tower to anchor against, and no overlooked vintage play, because the asset was never the building… it’s the island itself— water on four sides, one causeway to the mainland, no more lots. You’re paying for the dirt.

What does it cost to be here within this budget?

Flag the beachfront lines — Commodore Club South and East, plus the 1111 Crandon “A/B” Towers of Key Biscayne.

Beachfront 2/2s ask a median of $929/sqft. Everything else on the Key: about $706. That’s roughly a third more — call it $220 a foot — for the same two-bed footprint a few hundred feet closer to the water. The cheapest beachfront ask in the search, $853 at Commodore South, still clears the non-beachfront median by $150. The top of the search is beachfront too: Commodore South, $1,071/sqft.

And the market pays it — fast. The beachfront units have moved at a median of about 35 days against 90+ for everyone else. Premium price, a third of the wait (one Commodore East holdout at 245 days notwithstanding).

So that’s the price of sand: about a third more per foot to put the Atlantic off your balcony, cleared in a third of the time. In Brickell, I encourage buyers to hunt for the discount in the building everyone overlooks. On Key Biscayne there’s no discount to hunt — just a question of how close to the water you’re willing to pay to be.

-Daniel

Sellers are waiting. And waiting.

The median listing here has been sitting 118 days. Two in three are past 90 days. Nearly one in five are past 180. The champion: 424 days, asking $1,025/sqft. in a building where the median ask runs around $863/sqft. We’re talking hope with a lockbox.

Of the 43 listings, 29 are in Reach and Rise at Brickell City Centre — 18 in Rise alone. Every seller there isn’t competing with “Brickell.” They’re competing with seventeen neighbors running the same floor plans down the same elevator bank.

Near-identical 2/2 lines in the same building are asking anywhere from $785 to $927/sqft.

Old Brickell (South Brickell) is where the value hides

Some developers have taken to calling everything below Southeast 15th Road “South Brickell” — Old Brickell, the leafy end of the avenue. (Echo, at 1451 Brickell, doesn’t make the cut. The line is SE 15th Rd.) That’s where the vintage buildings in this search live: Brickell Townhouse (1963) and Brickell Place (1983) — asking $589 to $681/sqft. against roughly $863 for the 2016-vintage towers.

A 20–30% discount used to be shorthand for assessment roulette. But it’s 2026, and the early-80s buildings are now past their 40-year recertification mark — the scary structural unknowns have largely been inspected, scoped, and in many cases already paid for. The diligence that remains is financial: reserves, Structural Integrity Reserve Study (SIRS) compliance, pending assessments. And that deep dive isn’t optional anymore — Fannie and Freddie’s full-review policies require it on these buildings regardless.

-Daniel

TL;DR

• California’s top income-tax rate runs to ~13% and Florida’s is zero, so a high earner who relocates to Miami keeps roughly 13% more of every dollar — on a $1M income, that’s about $130K a year, which is most of why the move math pencils out.

• Private school in Coconut Grove runs $50-60K a year, and that school-driven family demand has helped push Grove new-construction past $2,000 a foot.

• Hedge funds like Citadel now run pods here and finance and big-law pay have caught up to Manhattan — but the “Wall Street of the South” label dates to the 1920s.

• One of Ken Griffin’s early Miami real estate bets reportedly went for about $60M and he exited a few years later for a $14M loss. A lesson that it’s easy to deploy capital here and hard to exit clean.

• Florida’s big November ballot question, which needs 60% to pass, would cut the annual assessment cap on non-homesteaded property from 10% to 5% — in some Miami submarkets running 8-12% yearly appreciation, that’s the real prize for investors, well past the headline ~$250K homestead break.

Moving to Miami is Easy

Miami has gotten so much practice absorbing newcomers that it’s now “efficient at onboarding new residents,” says Rob. We’ve taken in migrants for decades — the domestic ones just got the same welcome. The move itself was the part everyone dreads, except the fire had already stripped them of anything to move. Logistically easy. Emotionally brutal. Try calling a plumber down here and you’ll find the friction lives in the renovation, not the relocation.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Rob: Buy 🟩

They Moved to the Grove Because of the Schools

My thesis has always been that the Grove’s post-COVID run is foundationally about schools — Coconut Grove Elementary (an A-rated public option reportedly getting an eight-figure capital injection), plus St. Stephen’s, Ransom starting in sixth grade, and a couple of Montessoris you can walk to. Everything else — water, walkability, the wellness scene Rob’s wife is helping write — is gravy. At $50-60K a year for school, parents are openly debating whether it’s worth it in an AI world. They pay anyway. That’s the virtuous cycle: families in, businesses follow, prices follow that. Peter says Rob really came for the walk to Flanigan’s. Guilty as charged.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Rob: Buy 🟩

Miami is the “Wall Street of the South”

Rob jumped the gun and went short before he’d even finished the topic, and he’d know. Spend a week in finance in New York — which now actually means Midtown, not Wall Street — and you take five to ten meetings a day on foot. You can’t do that here in a week. Yes, Citadel and Millennium have pods down here, PE shops and investment banks are opening satellite offices, big law has matched Manhattan pay. But the same wealth is landing in Palm Beach, Boca, and Fort Lauderdale. It’s a blooming financial-services community. It does not hold a candle to a trading floor. The moniker’s been for sale since the 1920s — they recycled it rather than invent a new one.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
Peter: Sell 🟥
Rob: Sell 🟥

Miami Makes it Easy to Grow a Business

Rob isn’t treating Miami as a mailing address — he sees a future where it could be home to his company’s flagship HQ, willing to help relocate employees who also see a bright future here. But growing a business here is a different verdict from moving here. A Brazilian developer once told Peter it’s not about how much you make, it’s how much you leave with — plenty of operators get fleeced on the way to the exit. Ken Griffin’s first Miami move was a Faena condo he reportedly took a loss on. Easy to deploy capital; the question is whether it has legs once the demographic swings every summer.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨
Rob: Buy 🟩

Sneaky Change in Property Tax Secures the Vote

Governor DeSantis has spent a year promising to “eliminate property taxes” for homesteaders, and the version that cleared the House and Senate — now headed to November, needing 60% — does no such thing. It phases the homestead exemption up toward $250K. On a million-dollar house that’s a few thousand bucks; on a $500K house it can halve the bill; on a $3M house it’s a rounding error. With the county’s median single-family value well over $600K, residents will mostly shrug. The buried tidbit is the one investors won’t: lowering the non-homestead assessment cap from 10% to 5% a year. In submarkets appreciating 8-12%, that 10% cap was quietly gutting NOI. Cut it to 5% and you’ve de-risked every hold across the board. I thought the exemption was neutral theater. The cap is the real legislation — and it flipped this from anti-business to investor-friendly, which is exactly why I now think it passes. Nobody’s thrilled about handing thinner budgets to municipalities that couldn’t balance the fat ones.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩
Rob: 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

TL;DR

• Russell Galbut wants nine 30-story towers on the tired Galleria mall site in Fort Lauderdale via Live Local — roughly 40% workforce housing — then publicly called the NIMBYs “idiots.” Bold strategy.

• Developers are suddenly everywhere in the press: Terra’s David Martin financing a Miami short film, Related’s Jorge Pérez doing the media tour, Carlos Rosso, Andy Ansin. Peter’s read: a 1926-style confidence campaign, straight out of Bubble in the Sun.

• Related paid $180M for Fisher Island’s fuel terminals (listed at $200M); the county is now floating ~$400M to buy it back via eminent domain — while Fisher Island resales trade at roughly zero units, the worst resale market in South Florida.

• DeSantis wants to lift the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $500,000, claiming it would zero out property taxes for 92% of the state — even though Dade’s median single-family sits around $674,000. A 60% referendum stands between him and the headline.

• Gables Estates — 179 waterfront homes, no fixed bridges to the bay — has no less than five megamansions under construction on 1-3 acre lots that were trading near $20M pre-COVID.

“Once somebody gets there, they’ll be there”

Galbut wants to turn the underutilized Galleria on Sunrise Boulevard — surface parking, an aging mall, a great location a bridge from the beach — into thousands of units of housing, hotel, and retail, leaning on Live Local to push past the city.

Broward is the donut hole: not Dade’s international money, not Palm Beach’s old money, the middle child neither parent loves. Fort Lauderdale never embraced the 2002–2011 condo boom and isn’t about to start now. These are buildings where the condo docs bar you from ever renting your unit out. That’s not a market that wants density; it’s a market that wants to be left alone. Calling the people who vote on your project “idiots” is not how you get to groundbreaking — a Pennsylvania group couldn’t get this same site over the line a decade ago. Live Local is still the best bad idea we’ve got for workforce housing, but the messenger torched the message.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

Kissing Babies Sells More Condos

All at once, the boldface names are doing soft-focus press about community and making Miami better. Peter’s framework, courtesy of Bubble in the Sun: in 1926, after the Prinz Valdemar capsized in the turning basin and the September hurricane ended the land boom, developers rode Flagler’s train to New York to tell Wall Street everything was fine — and the audience promptly went home and sold their stock. A coordinated charm offensive isn’t strength… it’s a tell. Same as a sales office quietly bumping the brokers’ commissions from 5% to 8%. The industry calls it a “rebalancing.” Skeptics call it the start of an unraveling — and the Mercedes-Benz Places foreclosure and countersuit isn’t helping the calm-the-market narrative. When developers would rather be on their boats but are suddenly granting interviews, ask what the closings look like.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

Miami-Dade’s $400 Million “Oops”

The petroleum terminals on Fisher Island fuel Port Miami — the cruise business alone runs about $61B a year. Related bought that site for $180M (it was listed at $200M) and now wants to build condos on it, with no clear answer for where the fuel barges go. So the county is now talking about paying fair market value — reportedly ~$400M — to buy back dirt it could have grabbed for a fraction decades ago. For context, the Trump library site is pegged around $67M. Meanwhile Peter’s condo index shows Fisher Island resales trading at essentially zero units — the worst resale market in South Florida. Peter’s play for the mayor: negotiate to the 11th hour, then pull the ripcord and let Related sweat it.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

Florida Man is Hungry for Tax Savings

Floridians pay no income tax, so everything — schools, parks, potholes — runs on the 2% property tax, split a third county, a third school board, a third city. DeSantis wants to raise the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $500,000 and claims it zeroes out property taxes for 92% of the state. Hard to square with a Dade median single-family near $674,000. And the fine print bites: a five-year residency requirement to unlock the $500k, a House supermajority, then a 60% referendum. It does nothing for investors or snowbirds, and if it pushes underwater investors to sell, it floods an already-glutted condo market — picture months of supply going from rough to ruinous.

People know where their tax dollars go; they don’t know where their insurance money goes. With the Surfside tradgedy now five years out and storms always one season away, insurance reform is the fire. Property tax is a diversion.

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

• A Miami-Dade judge tossed a lawsuit by holdout owners at the Fontainebleau’s condo-hotel towers — a likely template ruling for every condo-hotel in South Florida.

• Jose Canero bought a 25-unit Coconut Grove building for ~$17M in May 2025 and flipped it for $45.5M — 160% appreciation, 2.6x cash, in twelve months.

• Coconut Grove and Coral Gables average $1,030sqft with a 74-day median days on market, per Condo Black Book.

• McKinsey has quadrupled its Miami headcount since the pandemic

• Q1 2026 saw 3,382 closed sales over $1M (+22% YoY); out-of-state driver’s license swaps rose 24% YoY — mostly NY, CA, and NJ.

The Fontaine-blues

The Fontainebleau is four buildings, 1,504 rooms, and a piece of property-law history — Lapidus’s Versailles Tower went up partly to throw shade, literally, on the Eden Roc next door, producing a 1959 ruling that you have no legal right to sunlight. The Soffer-era resort later added two condo-hotel towers: Tresor (37 stories, 461 units) and Sorrento (285 units). A handful of holdout owners — the roughly 10% who skip the in-house rental program — sued, claiming the Fontainebleau was gouging them on housekeeping and requiring an owner or certified agent at every check-in. A judge said tough luck.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Quite the Chateau in Coconut Grove

Jose Canero — not Canseco — bought a 25-unit Grove building for about $17M in May 2025. Last week he flipped it to El-Ad for $45.5M. That’s 160% appreciation in twelve months — no entitlements, no construction, no five-year build. He made roughly $28M herding cats. The lot is T4-L, three stories by right, a no-view parcel that’ll need Live Local bonuses for real density. And Canero isn’t done — he and 8K Capital already grabbed a 66-unit termination immediately north for ~$22M. Why the frenzy? One Park Grove resales trade higher than any other building in the city and we’re seeing people make real money off of the preconscruction prices from the Mr. C Residences that delivered back in May 2025. The Grove and Gables average $1,030sqft, days on market sit at 74. The land is appreciating faster than anyone can build on it. If you’ve got a tired multifamily in the Grove, pick up the phone and give us a call.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

McKinsey Push Validates Miami Office Market

McKinsey has 4x’d its Miami headcount since the pandemic and just signed for more Brickell space. Peter thinks Brickell Avenue is a commoner’s address — middle seat in the row. I think butts in seats is the only signal that matters, and at roughly 150sqft per employee, that’s a lot of new consultants. Here’s the buyer angle: a first-year post-MBA McKinsey associate clears about $260k in total comp, with a partner-track path toward $1M+ within a decade. Those are the people paying $1,500/sqft for Brickell condos and $5,000/month for Edgewater rentals — the actual demand.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

Billionaire Beach Has a Sunny Forecast

The roll call keeps growing — Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Google founders, Schultz, Thiel, Ken Griffin. A lot of them raced here ahead of California’s proposed wealth tax, which locks residency to January 1, 2026. Zuckerberg signed for an unfinished Indian Creek house at $170M. Up and down Collins, the Ritz-Carlton redevelopment is asking $125M for its top residence. The data agrees — Q1 2026 saw $5M-$10M sales up 35%, $10M-plus sales up 13%, and out-of-state license swaps up 24%. Peter’s worried about pitchforks and a tightening spigot: Fannie Mae kills limited review on condo resales in August, and reserve requirements jump to 15% in January, with mortgage rates north of 6.5%.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Sell 🟥

Struggling in SoMi

South Miami has been promised a generational redevelopment of Sunset Place for years. The permits are real — 1.47 million sqft, 1,500 residential units, a 300-key hotel, seven towers, a performing-arts venue, 3.4 acres of open space. Approved since last July. Demolished? Nothing. Mayor Fernandez has gone on record that the city isn’t the holdup anymore — it’s on the developer. And the developer is Alex Vadia, a land banker who buys dirt, JVs, and famously doesn’t build — see the Midtown assemblage and the Infinity 2 site he retraded to Jorge Perez. Across US-1, 13th Floor Investments won the request for proposal (RFP) for the Government Center site, promising a Link-at-Douglas-style transit play. Plans, renderings, RFPs — still no cranes. I’ll believe it when I see a backhoe.

Daniel: Sell 🟥
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

Welcome to the 1st Annual BSH Awards.

TL;DR

• Rookie of the Year went to Carlos Rosso — a 30-year condo veteran whose first solo project, The Standard in Midtown, is also his first without the Related Group as a backstop.

• Oak Row Equities took Highest Bar Tab of the Year for a $520M Brickell Bay Drive assemblage — roughly $122M per acre across 4.25 acres and 500ft. of bay frontage.

• Ana Bozovic won the Carl Fisher Ballyhoo Award for being the loudest Miami voice this year. Analytics Miami was Miami’s #1 cheerleader to buy-or-pass deal sheet just as inventory swelled past 24 months.

• Only in Miami went to Dr. Marvin Dunn, the civil rights professor suing to block a Trump library on Miami-Dade College land appraised as high as $360M-plus but transferred for $10.

• Two Roads Development won Can’t Get It Up for Biscayne 21, still gutted and stalled after a failed bid to terminate the condo on an 80% vote instead of the required 100%.

Rookie of the Year

Peter’s pick was Carlos Rosso — and yes, the man has built Miami condos for three decades; however, many of those years inside the Related Group, answering to Jorge Perez. He just delivered on The Standard in Midtown, the first Miami project on his own. He’s already doubling down with a mega project on the old Midtown Walmart site — a veteran finally called up from the minors. My nominee was Adam Neumann, WeWork’s encore act, now roughly 5,000 units deep into a South Florida pipeline under Flow, including the rebranded Society Wynwood to Flow House Wynwood. Peter had Neumann too, so he swapped in Dave Martin (not to be confused with Terra’s David Martin) — Swire’s third leader in four years, now tasked with taking the Mandarin Oriental’s new Brickell Key towers vertical with no local build record.

Winner: Carlos Rosso

Highest Bar Tab of the Year

This one honors the deal that made every other developer spit out their espresso. My pick: Oak Row Equities, the early-thirties duo who paid $520M for a 4.25-acre assemblage on Brickell Bay Drive — an aging office tower, the Yacht Club apartments, and 500ft. of bay frontage — then JV’d with Vladislav Doronin (of Missoni, Una, Aman fame) to make the basis work. Peter countered with Steve Witkoff’s reported $120M unit at the Shore Club Private Collection, and Christian Angle’s $78.9M Palm Beach listing: 14,500sqft. on the Intracoastal, no sand, $5,441/sqft. I also floated Nahla Capital’s $270M grab of the Raleigh. Peter gave me the vote — $520M for dirt is a lot of dough.

Winner: Oak Row Equities

The Carl Fisher Ballyhoo Award

Named for the showman who dropped a motorcycle from a hot-air balloon to sell an idea, this is marketer of the year — promoting a concept, accuracy optional. Peter nominated the E11even cabaret-to-condo crowd and Craig Studnicky of ISG World, whose bullish numbers, he argues, tend to omit the inconvenient comps. I went with PMG’s Ryan Shear, who just launched the 90-story, 421-unit Delano into a central business district already carrying 24 months of inventory. The winner, though, was Ana Bozovic of Analytics Miami — the “long Miami” evangelist.

Winner: Ana Bozovic

Only in Miami

The story you can’t make up — except here you don’t have to. My nominee: the $85.2M Bay Point trade tied to Brazil’s Banco Master, double the neighborhood’s prior record and now swept into a $7.7B fraud probe with a Mission Impossible name, “Operation Compliance Zero.” Peter nominated the Trump Presidential Library deal — Miami-Dade College land estimated to be worth $360M+, transferred for $10. With Eric Trump, the governor, and eight forgettable trustees all elbow-deep in that pie, we couldn’t mint enough NFTs. So as a compromise we handed it to Dr. Marvin Dunn — the civil rights professor emeritus suing to block the transfer, with Miami-Dade College students listed as co-plaintiffs.

Winner: Dr. Marvin Dunn

Can’t Get It Up Award

The big one: the developer who promised the moon and delivered, well, nothing. Peter led with Ken Griffin (aka Ken Billions), whose Brickell office tower has ballooned from a $1B near-term promise to a $2.5B, 2030 maybe. I countered with Michael Stern’s Mercedes-Benz Places — Cottonwood Group foreclosed on a $86M bridge loan — and Gilberto Bomeny’s Regalia site in downtown, entitled back in 2014 with 1.5M sqft. of approved development and still not one shovel of new dirt eleven years on. Peter added Stephen Ross, who didn’t have a good enough outlook for his office tower at 8th-and-Brickell; he and his partners at Swire decided to sell the dirt out from under it to Melo for $211.5M. But the kill shot was Two Roads Development’s Biscayne 21 — gutted, stalled, and buried in litigation after a failed gambit to terminate the condo on an 80% vote instead of the required 100%.

Winner: Two Roads Development (Biscayne 21 / The Edition)

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

• DAMAC’s Hussein Sajwani has reportedly sold zero units at The Delmore in Surfside since the January 2025 launch — pricing $15M to $150M

• 1000 Group (the team behind 1000 Museum) is putting the Anantara condo at Biscayne and 36th, next to the I-195 underpass, with the Thai hotel brand attached

• Wynwood average rent: $3,444/mo, up 6% YoY; 75% renters; Adam Neumann’s Flow has ~5,000 units in the pipeline

• David Martin paid $12.5M for 25% of the Deauville’s 4-acre oceanfront site — Stephen Ross had offered $500M for the whole thing before failing to overcome a referendum regarding density on the site

• Michael Simpkins and Marc Roberts want $500M for their 6.9-acre assemblage west of E11even — about $70M/acre on dirt they took down for $53M in 2014

Nobody Wants to Buy at the Delmore

Hussain Sajwani — “the Donald Trump of Dubai” — bought the Champlain Towers South site and launched sales for The Delmore in January 2025. Units start at $15M, top out at $150M. According to the developer, they haven’t sold a single unit.

That doesn’t add up. Sajwani is from Dubai, cozy with the Trumps, and somehow can’t get one buyer to anchor a deal here? Nadim Ashi just closed roughly $400M at his 11-unit boutique north of the Surf Club — the buyer pool for $50M condos exists. This reads like a soft plead for a JV, or an upzoning play in poor-me PR clothing.

Daniel: Hold 🟨
Peter: Sell 🟥

This Branding Thing Is Getting Out of Control

Miami is second only to Dubai in branded towers. Aston Martin, Bentley, Pagani, Mercedes-Benz, Bulgari, Fendi, Baccarat, Waldorf, Ritz, Six Senses, Nobu (there are quite a few more) — and now the 1000 Group is dropping Anantara at Biscayne and 36th. Yes, the brand from White Lotus. No, you’re not on the water. You’re next to I-195, across the Brightline tracks, and you walk under an overpass to reach the Design District.

Here’s why we’re still buying. The 1000 Group — Greg Covens and Louis Birdman — put up 1000 Museum in downtown. They walked into a no-go district and made it a Zaha Hadid landmark. Bet the jockey, not the horse. Extend the Metromover north past the Omni and that corner suddenly works.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

Tenants Are Flowing Into Wynwood

Adam Neumann took PMG out of Society Wynwood and is running the Flow brand with roughly 5,000 multifamily units in the pipeline. The rent comps support the demand thesis — Wynwood average $3,444/mo (up 6% YoY), studios at $2,600, three-beds at $5,500, with 75% renting and over 900 units listed.

The renter math works. The owner math doesn’t. Wynwood was built on transplanted New York mythology, not Miami fundamentals — no water access, no I-95 ramp, crime concerns, and the storefronts that mattered (Wynwood Brewery, Austin Burke) are gone. Neumann’s actual play looks less like selling condos to individuals and more like bundling units for his VC network — same template he used at Flow House. Tenants flowing in? Yes. The 45-year-old professional buyer? Not in this submarket.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Hold 🟨

The Deauville Dirt Is Worth the Fight

David Martin paid $12.5M for a 25% stake in The Deauville — the four-acre oceanfront site at 67th and Collins where the Beatles played their second Ed Sullivan show (the first uber famous one was in NYC). Some of the Meruelo family heirs are now suing him for $100M in damages, claiming 88-year-old matriarch Belinda Meruelo was defrauded.

Here’s why we’re both buy. Two years ago, Stephen Ross offered $500M for the whole site before pulling out when his FAR variance referendum failed. At Martin’s basis, 25% of a $500M asset implies a $50M valuation — a quarter-seat at the table for a tenth of the prior bid. Even if he burns $10M defending the deal, $50M for four oceanfront acres twenty blocks south of where DAMAC paid north of $100M for a smaller, more stigmatized parcel is a layup. Developers are gunslingers. Martin showed up at high noon.

Daniel: Buy 🟩
Peter: Buy 🟩

$500M for the Block Next to the Cabaret

Michael Simpkins and Marc Roberts — the E11even guys — are shopping their 6.9-acre assemblage just west of the towers for $500M, or about $70M/acre. They took it down for $53M in 2014.

The math at $500M needs a $3B sellout to clear. Closest comp: Melo’s 2.8-acre buy next to Brickell City Center at $211.5M last May — same per-acre pricing. If Simpkins and Roberts’s three towers close out clean, the dirt revalues up. If they don’t, $500M is the ceiling. And if they cut a check toward the Underdeck park — which just lost its $60M federal earmark to a DEI rescission — they buy goodwill worth more than another comp.

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. Next Friday is our one-year anniversary episode and we’re handing out awards.

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