Brickell City Centre sells nearly $500M in condos

Swire Properties, developer of the Brickell City Centre mega-project, just announced condo sales at the project have reached nearly half a billion dollars.

The announcement is a major milestone for the $1.05 billion project, which broke ground in 2012 and is aiming to finish its first phase this year.

Last month, Swire opened the first of Brickell City Centre’s 43-story condo towers, Reach, and unit closings began being recorded in county records last week.

Its 43-story sister building, Rise, is expected to open this summer, and the 500,000-square-foot retail portion is slated to open this fall. Sales for Rise are at 42 percent, according to a release.

The two all-glass towers each house 390 units with prices ranging from $595,000 to $2.7 million.

Maile Aguila, Swire’s senior vice president of residential sales, said more than two-thirds of the project’s condo buyers have been from South America and Central America. The project is also seeing a strong showing from Caribbean buyers, with small selections of Asian and domestic buyers from the Northeast.

“It’s pretty much the same demographics we’ve seen all along,” she told The Real Deal. “The Brickell market is very well-known by South Americans and Latin Americans because it was always their financial district and where all their consulates are.”

Although Reach and Rise used the industry standard 50 percent deposit structure, Aguila said the project actually skipped the typical reservation phase altogether: buyers went straight to contract because “we were going to built it no matter what,” Aguila said.

She said buyers put 20 percent down at the contract phase, another 15 percent 120 days after that, and the final 15 percent after 240 days.

“Most of our competition has a lot of investor buyers; the investor wants more time during the deposit structure,” she told TRD. “We really try to develop and sell for end-users.”

Sales for the project are being handled by ONE Sotheby’s International Realty and Fortune International Realty.