Fortune, Chateau to rework Sunny Isles project into condos only

At least two developers seem bullish about Miami-Dade County’s condo market.

Fortune International Group and Chateau Group have reworked their planned residential project in Sunny Isles Beach, removing its hotel and apartment components and adding on more condos.

As the South Florida Business Journal first pointed out, the two developers are set to go before city commissioners this Thursday to seek approvals for their redesigned Varadero project at 18801 Collins Avenue.

Their original plans included two 56-story towers with a combined 431 condos, 60 hotel rooms and 90 apartments. But according to commission agenda documents, the developers now want to remove the hotel and apartment components completely, instead building 490 condos and 12 cabanas that would be available for purchase to unit buyers.

In addition to the residences, Varadero would have a 7,181-square-foot branded restaurant, 7,780 square feet of “corporate office space” and 1,850 square feet of retail.

The revised plan also cuts out a bridge that was supposed to connect the two towers, replacing it with an open-air canopy.

In their letter of intent to the commission, the developers said removing Varadero’s hotel and apartment components would “significantly reduce traffic impacts from the project.”

Fortune and Chateau paid $113 million for the 4.7-acre development site in November 2014. At the time, it was occupied by the La Playa de Varadero condo-hotel, whose residences the two developers bought out individually.

The news comes amid a residential slowdown in Miami-Dade, with submarkets like the downtown and Miami Beach areas posting big drops in re-sale activity during the first quarter. For the preconstruction market, however, sales seem to be faring better: a fourth-quarter report from brokerage ISG surveyed some of Miami’s most well-known preconstruction projects and found 76 of the pipeline supply had been sold so far.