Midtown 2, a condo tower in what some are calling the “New Brooklyn”
A three-bedroom, two-bathroom property at Midtown 2 in Miami is the top sale in the Design District/Midtown neighborhood so far this year, according to data compiled by Condo Vultures from the Multiple Listing Service.
Midtown 2 is part of a large-scale series of condominium towers in Midtown developed by Midtown Equities. The company is led by Joe Cayre, who was a fellow investor on the 99-year lease of the World Trade Center with Larry Silverstein.
The Midtown Miami development is a $2.3 billion dollar community, with 1,104 condo units, 600,000 square feet of retail and 200,000 square feet of office space.
The top five sales in the area this year include a condo at 3470 E. Coast Avenue, a house at 176 NE 44th Street, a condo at 3301 NE 1st Avenue, and two more houses, 30 NW 48th Street and 406 NW 53rd Street.
“Residential sales [in Midtown] have picked up,” said Jeff Morr, the founder and CEO of Majestic Properties, who has done residential deals in the area. “The Midtown area especially is very hot; people are calling it ‘the new Brooklyn.’
The area is very popular — there are a lot of rentals, and the cash buyers are buying at around $200 a square foot, which is about half of what it was sold for in pre-construction.”
Midtown, which is bordered by NE 20th Street to the South, and I-195 to the north, includes a series of new retail shops and restaurants, including Mexican restaurant Mercadito, which also has locations in New York, and Sugarcane, which is part of the SushiSamba family.
“It is actually a strong area,” sai
d Franck Dossa, a broker at Condhotel.com, who has handled deals in the area. “I was thinking that the area would go down in price, but it’s one of the areas that was stronger than Miami downtown, stronger than Brickell, because they don’t have that much inventory. You have Midtown, which has three buildings, that’s it. I expected the prices to go down maybe 40 to 45 percent, and they went down 30 to 40 percent.”
Dossa said a major reason for the area’s success was that the developers did not build as much as they originally intended due to the onset of the downturn.
Second on the top sales list was a house at 176 NE 44th Street in the Design District, which sold for $257,000, marking an average per-square-foot price of $143.81. While most of the residential housing in the Design District, Morr said there was a small single-family house component to the Design District, which is just north of the Midtown area.
In the third slot on the list was another Midtown development property, 3301 NE 1st Avenue #H1210, which is in Midtown 4, sold for $207,000 at the end of January, which represents an average per-square-foot price of $181.
“Midtown 2 and 4 and Midblock [the main properties in the Midtown development] are full,” said Morr. “People love living in them — the area has the same energy that South Beach had in the 1990s, with the feeling of people who were pioneers. There are not a lot of sales, because financing is still difficult, but more people are interested in buying.”
Rounding on the top five were two other Design District homes, one on 30 NW 48 St, which sold for $163,700, and another, a 2,758-square-foot home at 406 NW 53 St, which sold $125,000. The latter property had an assessed value of $330,000 in 2009, but was purchased last summer for just $67,000.