Developers appeal to “modest” budgets with two new Edgewater condo projects

26 Edgewater rendering (inset: Peter Zalewski)
26 Edgewater rendering (inset: Peter Zalewski)

As preconstruction prices for new high-rise condo towers rapidly increase in the Edgewater neighborhood of Greater Downtown Miami, at least two competing developers are proposing mid-rise projects with fewer frills that are targeted to buyers with more modest budgets.

The newly planned condo buildings – the Edgewater project and 26 Edgewater – are slated to be developed on infill sites located between Biscayne Boulevard and Biscayne Bay, according to the preconstruction condo projects website CraneSpotters.com.

(For disclosure purposes, my firm operates the website.)

The projects are named after the Edgewater neighborhood in the Biscayne Boulevard Corridor of Greater Downtown Miami that is located east of Biscayne Boulevard between the Julia Tuttle Causeway and Northeast 17th Terrace.

The Edgewater project is slated to be a seven-story building with 30 units located on a site in the 400 block of Northeast 29th Street between the planned 51-story Biscayne Beach project located to the east on Northeast 29th Street and the planned 43-story ICON Bay project on Northeast 28th Street.

The planned Edgewater, which is requiring buyer deposits of 30 percent, has a minimum asking price of less than $415 per square foot. Some 25 percent of the project is already under contract, according to the CraneSpotters.com Developer Price Survey for November.

A few blocks south, 26 Edgewater is slated to be 10-story condo project with 86 units being developed on a newly cleared site in the 300 block of Northeast 26th Street, just west of where Russian mining oligarch Oleg Baybakov recently paid nearly $40 million to assemble nearly an entire block for a new high-rise waterfront condo complex.

The planned 26 Edgewater, which is requiring buyer deposits of 50 percent but will reportedly permit contract assignments, has a minimum asking price of $430 per square foot. Nearly 30 percent of the planned units are said to be under contract.
In the Edgewater neighborhood, developers are currently proposing 15 new condo towers totaling nearly 3,750 units.

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When the two newly announced mid-rise projects are excluded, the remaining 13 towers are slated to stand an average of 38 floors and feature nearly 280 units in the Edgewater neighborhood.

The minimum mean presale price for the preconstruction condo towers – excluding the two new mid-rise projects – is nearly $500 per square foot in the Edgewater area.

Compare this with the condo resale market in Edgewater, where more than 320 units are available for purchase at an average asking price of $438 per square foot, according to data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange.

In the first 10 months of this year, buyers acquired nearly 300 units on the resale market at an average transaction price of $380 per square foot.

The Edgewater neighborhood currently has nearly 11 months of condo resale inventory available for purchase.

A healthy market typically has about six months of resale inventory available for purchase. Less supply indicates a seller’s market and more supply suggests a buyer’s market.

The unanswered question going forward is whether the new mid-rise condo towers in the Edgewater neighborhood will enjoy any competitive advantage over the planned high-rise towers with preconstruction buyers.

Peter Zalewski is real estate columnist for The Real Deal who founded Condo Vultures LLC, a consultancy and publishing company, as well as Condo Vultures Realty LLC and CVR Realty brokerages and the Condo Ratings Agency, an analytics firm. The Condo Ratings Agency operates CraneSpotters.com, a preconstruction condo projects website, in conjunction with the Miami Association of Realtors.