68% of condos in MyBrickell are already up for resale or lease

More than two-thirds of the units in the sold out MyBrickell condo tower in Greater Downtown Miami have already been listed for resale or lease since the project was completed less than 11 months ago.

Developed by the Related Group, MyBrickell is a 28-story condo tower with 192 units completed in January on a site located between Brickell Avenue and the new $1.05 billion Brickell City Centre mixed-use project being constructed.

In a nearly seven-month period that ended in July, buyers acquired every residential unit in the MyBrickell project for about $57 million, or an average price of $360 per square foot, according to Miami-Dade government records.

Almost immediately after each of the individual transactions occurred, a super majority of the new owners looked to unload or rent out their units rather than take occupancy themselves.

Today, nearly 30 condo units are on the resale market at an average asking price of $410 per square foot, according to data from the Southeast Florida MLXchange.

An additional four units with an average asking price of about $407 per square foot are under contract waiting to transact. To date, four units were resold at an average price of less than $385 per square foot.

On the rental front, 14 units are available for lease at a median asking price of $2.16 per square foot monthly as of Tuesday.

Currently, 10 units with a median asking price of $1.92 per square foot have a pending lease in place. Nearly 100 additional units have been leased out at a median price of $2.35 per square foot monthly, according to the data.
The amount of resale and leasing activity in the MyBrickell project is noteworthy as it suggests – albeit in only one new condo tower in Greater Downtown Miami – that speculators may, in fact, be playing a key role in this latest South Florida boom.

In an effort to avoid a repeat of the last South Florida boom-bust cycle, developers have repeatedly said publicly that they hope to limit the number of speculators participating this time around by requiring 50 percent deposits from preconstruction condo buyers.

To date, developers have announced plans to build nearly 70 new condo towers totaling about 18,400 units in Greater Downtown Miami, according to the preconstruction condo projects website CraneSpotters.com.

(For disclosure purposes, my firm operates the website.)

Overall, developers have announced plans to build 290 new condo towers totaling more than 39,700 units east of I-95 in the tri-county South Florida region of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.

The unanswered question going forward is whether the volume of resale and rental activity in the MyBrickell project ends up being a one-time occurrence or instead the beginning of a trend for the South Florida preconstruction condo market.

Peter Zalewski is 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.