Less than 90 days after opening, the newly completed BrickellHouse condo project has sold 98 percent of the 374 residential units in the 46-story tower in Greater Downtown Miami.
Developer Harvey Hernandez has successfully recorded transactions for 366 units totaling more than $157 million for an average purchase price of about $489 per square foot as of Sunday, according to Miami-Dade County records.
Individual condos in BrickellHouse have transacted at prices between less than $150,000 to as much as $4.9 million per unit in the project, located in the 1300 block of Brickell Bay Drive in the Brickell Avenue Area submarket, according to government records.
The remaining eight unsold residential units in the BrickellHouse project feature more than 16,600 square feet of salable space with an estimated value of more than $8 million, according to government records.
Early indications are a number of the new owners are already trying to resell or rent out their BrickellHouse units.
More than 60 condo units are already on the resale market at an average asking price of nearly $615 per square foot as of Monday, according to data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange.
Additionally, nearly 20 BrickellHouse condo units are listed on the rental market at a median asking price of $2,850 per month or $3.60 per square foot, according to the data.
The success of the new BrickellHouse condo tower was not always evident.
Back in October 2013, the BrickellHouse was hit with – but ultimately resolved – a $15.8 million foreclosure lawsuit filed against the project by the private lender that sold Hernandez’s group the land for the new tower, according to The Real Deal.
Hernandez’s group later initiated its own lawsuit against the former lender for filing a foreclosure action that it claimed was “malicious prosecution.”
BrickellHouse – which began construction in July 2012 – is one of 71 new condo towers with nearly 18,400 unit announced to date for the Greater Downtown Miami market since this cycle began in 2011, according to the preconstruction condo market website CraneSpotters.com. (For disclosure, my firm operates the website.)
Overall, developers have proposed at least 316 new condo towers with more than 40,600 units east of I-95 in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties during this cycle.
The unanswered question going forward is whether future projects in Greater Downtown Miami will experience the same success as the BrickellHouse project when the time comes for preconstruction condo buyers to complete their pre-sale purchase contracts.
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 pre-construction condo projects website, in conjunction with the Miami Association of Realtors.