Related’s condo chief Carlos Rosso says last construction cycle still dwarfs current boom

Although tens of thousands of condominiums and rental properties are in the pipeline, the Miami area is still experiencing inventory shortgages, Carlos Rosso, the head of condo development at the Related Group, said on WLRN’s Sunshine Economy.

“At Related, we’ve diversified ourselves. Right now we’re doing 2,500 condos, another 3,000 rental units and close to 4,000 affordable housing units. It’s [the market] has come back with force and really surprised us but we don’t think there is enough and brokers will tell you there’s no inventory to sell,” Rosso said on the radio program.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of cranes across South Florida, the present boom is smaller than during the last cycle, Rosso said.

“On the condominium side, what we’re seeing right now is that during this last crash a lot of what we call “dentist developers,” people who were never really developers, have disappeared from the marketplace, so the market has become, I would say, more grown up,” Rosso said.

“Buyers who are putting down large sums of cash are real buyers. We try to discourage the flippers and the only way we found of doing that was asking big deposits, so we’ve seen a lot less development than in the previous cycle,” he said. [WLRN] –Emily Schmall