How to actually read a Miami condo comp
Two units in the same tower can be worth wildly different numbers. Here is what moves the price.
The single most common mistake buyers make in Miami is treating a building like a price. "Brickell condos are $X a foot" is a headline, not a valuation. Inside one tower, the spread between a low floor facing the street and a high floor facing the bay can be enormous, and the list prices rarely tell you why.
When I pull comps, I am not just matching bedrooms and square footage. I am adjusting for floor, exposure (direct bay, city, or pool deck), line within the stack, whether the unit is renovated or original, and how the HOA and assessments compare. Two identical floor plans can justify very different offers once those factors are on the table.
A real example
Royal Embassy, a 1968 building at 5750 Collins Avenue in Mid-Beach, shows why I start with the building. Its three sales of the last 24 months closed at a median $357 a square foot. Every Mid-Beach building on my pages closed at a median $551 over the same 24 months, on 666 sales. Price a Royal Embassy unit off the Mid-Beach median and you would be roughly 35% too high. Price it off three sales and you are working from a thin record, so I read it as a direction, not a price (building record).
What I check before I trust a comp
- Same building first. Closed sales in your own building beat any neighborhood average.
- Floor, view and line. A high unit on the bay and a low unit on the street in the same tower are different products.
- Condition. Renovated or original changes the number, and so does what the next buyer will have to spend.
- Fees and assessments. Two identical units with different monthly dues, or a pending special assessment, are not the same price.
- The building's documents. The milestone inspection and the reserve study can move a unit's value more than its finishes.
- Sample size. A median on three sales is a hint, not a price. I show the count next to the medians in my data notes.
The point of a comp is not to win an argument, it is to make a confident decision. A good comp set tells you the realistic range, where the current listing sits inside it, and how much room there is to negotiate, so you are moving on evidence instead of a feeling.
If you want a real comp read on a specific building or unit, send it over and I will put the numbers in front of you.
Every closed sale and lease since 2019, building by building, with the sample behind each median.
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