$5 TO $10 MILLION

Between $5 million and $10 million you have cleared the luxury threshold on both sides of the Miami market — $3.4 million for condominiums, $4.3 million for houses — and you are approaching, without reaching, the ultra-luxury line: $10.0 million for condominiums and $15.0 million for single-family homes. This is the top 5% of Miami-Dade, and it is where the buyer’s central question stops being can I finance this and becomes what will this cost me to own.

Dollar volume is rising faster than transaction count — and that is this band

Miami-Dade closed 2,107 transactions in June 2026, up 14.3% year over year, on $2.4 billion of dollar volume, up 36.39%. Volume grew at more than twice the rate of transactions. Sales at $1 million and above rose 29.1%, to 483.

That gap is the whole story of the upper market in 2026: the count is rising, but the mix is rising faster. Miami is not selling many more homes than a year ago. It is selling meaningfully more expensive ones. The top 5% is where that shift is concentrated, and this band is the working middle of the top 5%.

Carrying cost, not credit, is the variable

Most purchases here are cash or privately financed, so the 2026 agency condominium rules read like someone else’s problem. They are not, for two reasons.

The first is your exit. Whoever buys this from you in seven years may well borrow, and they will be tested against whatever the standard is then. The direction of travel is already visible: Fannie Mae retired Limited Review for established projects on 3 August 2026 (Lender Letter LL-2026-03), capped master policy deductibles at $50,000 per unit from 1 July 2026, and raises minimum reserves from 10% to 15% of annual budgeted assessment income on 4 January 2027. Every one of those is a building-level test that outlives your ownership.

The second is that the same underlying facts — reserves, insurance, structural condition — determine your own cost of ownership regardless of how you paid. A building that would fail a lender’s Full Review is a building whose reserves are thin, whose insurance is expensive, or whose maintenance is deferred. All three arrive on your statement as assessments.

The milestone calendar is the most valuable unpublished number in Miami

Florida Statute 553.899 requires a milestone structural inspection of any condominium or cooperative building of three habitable stories or more by 31 December of the year the building reaches 30 years of age, then every 10 years thereafter. A local enforcement agency may determine that local circumstances require the first inspection at 25 years — the discretion aimed squarely at buildings close to salt water, which in this band is most of them.

Every building’s first milestone year follows mechanically from its certificate of occupancy date. Nobody publishes it building by building. At $5–$10 million a single special assessment following an adverse milestone finding can run to six figures per unit, and it is the most reliably underestimated line in luxury condominium ownership. Get the milestone year, the report if one exists, and the structural integrity reserve study before you offer — not during inspection period.

Houses in this band are a different asset

Above the $4.3 million single-family luxury threshold you are typically buying land with a house on it, in a market with 4.9 months of supply and no association, no milestone statute and no reserve study. The trade is straightforward: you assume the entire maintenance and insurance burden yourself, and in exchange nobody can vote to assess you.

For the gated waterfront enclaves that dominate this band — Cocoplum, Old Cutler Bay, Snapper Creek, the Miami Beach islands — the diligence moves to different ground: club membership as a precondition of purchase, transfer and application fees, dock and channel specifics, and seawall obligations. Those are enclave-by-enclave questions, and the answers are rarely written down in the listing.

What I would do

Decide first whether the association is a feature or a liability for you. If you want the building to handle everything, buy the condominium and underwrite the association like you would underwrite a small company: reserves, insurance, litigation, milestone calendar, three years of budgets, and the minutes. If you would rather control the asset, buy the house and price the insurance before you price the finishes. Either way, at this level the diligence that matters is not about the property. It is about who is obliged to pay for what, and when.