New GLASS South Beach condo tower tops $70M in sales

A fourth new condo project in the high-end South-of-Fifth neighborhood of Miami Beach has been completed during this South Florida real estate cycle that began in 2011.

To date, eight transactions in the newly completed 10-unit GLASS project — formally called the Glass120 condominium — in the 100 block of Ocean Drive have been recorded at an average price of nearly $2,700 per square foot for a combined $70.5 million as of Monday, according to Miami-Dade County records.

Individual unit transactions in GLASS have ranged in price from $3.4 million to as much as $20 million each. On a price per square foot basis, individual unit transactions have been recorded between less than $2,100 to more than $3,000 each, according to government records.

As of Monday, one condo — unit 600 — in GLASS was listed for sale on the Multiple Listing Service at an asking price of more than $3,015 per square foot based on “unit area,” according to a combination of data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange and the project’s amended Declaration Of Condominium.

This same unit 600 in GLASS was purchased on Oct. 26 at a price of about $2,094 per square foot, according to government records.

Developed by the Terra Group with the father-and-son team of Pedro and David Martin, GLASS is an 18-story condo project located on the west side of Ocean Drive next to the popular Prime 112 steak restaurant at the southern tip of the barrier island in Miami-Dade County, according to government records.

The completion of the GLASS project occurred on the same day as the nearby Marea South Beach complex that consists of three buildings and a combined 30 units located on South Pointe Drive.

The Marea South Beach recorded its first transaction about four hours before the initial deed was recorded at the Glass tower on Oct. 15, according to government records.

The first new condo project to be completed during this South Florida real estate cycle in the South of Fifth neighborhood was the 321 Ocean project that consists of a pair of buildings with a total of 22 units on the east side of Ocean Drive. Transactions for that project began to be recorded in May.

A month later, in June, the 350 Meridian boutique condo with four units was completed.

In total, developers have announced plans to build 11 new condo buildings with nearly 150 units in the South-of-Fifth neighborhood of Miami Beach. Overall in Miami Beach, developers have announced plans to build 46 new condo buildings with nearly 1,950 units in the barrier island city, according to the preconstruction condo projects website CraneSpotters.com. (For disclosure, my firm operates the website.)

Overall, South Florida developers have announced plans to build a total of 387 new condo buildings with more than 46,250 units east of I-95 east in the tri-county region of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach during this cycle.

In completing the GLASS project, developers have now constructed 48 new condo buildings with more than 3,715 units east of I-95 in the tri-county South Florida region since 2011.  

An additional 121 new condo buildings with about 11,650 units are currently under construction in South Florida, according to the data.

The new condo projects that are under construction or recently completed account for more than 33 percent of the total units announced for South Florida during this latest boom.

An additional 30,900 new units — nearly 67 percent of the South Florida preconstruction total — are currently in the planning or presale phase of development.  

The unanswered question going forward is whether buyers in the market for a condo today are as bullish on the South-of-Fifth neighborhood of Miami Beach as those developers and unit owners who are attempting to sell at increasingly higher prices.  

Peter Zalewski is a 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.