Roney Palace

Roney Palace sits at 2301 Collins Avenue on the most historically significant hotel parcel in Miami Beach — the site of the Roney Plaza, the city’s first monumental beachfront resort. And it is one of very few condominiums anywhere that shares its lobby, its beach and its amenities directly with a working luxury hotel, in this case 1 Hotel South Beach.

That arrangement is the reason to buy here. It is also the reason the association documents matter more than they would anywhere else.

The site: Miami Beach’s first grand oceanfront hotel

Newton Roney and Schultze and Weaver

Newton Baker Taylor Roney, a New Jersey lawyer, bought the land from John Collins’ Miami Beach Improvement Company for $2,500,000 — an extraordinary sum for Florida land in the mid-1920s. He hired Schultze and Weaver, the New York firm responsible for the Waldorf-Astoria, Miami’s Freedom Tower and the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

That commission tells you the ambition. Roney was not building a Florida beach hotel; he was importing the architects of the Waldorf to a sand bar.

What stood here

By 1926 the doors opened on 350 rooms, 52 shop spaces, fine dining and enormous formal gardens across nine storeys. A cabana club followed in 1931, adding 100 cabanas, a swimming pool, spa facilities and further shops.

The Miami Design Preservation League describes it as “the very first of many monumental beachfront resorts” — the building that established what Miami Beach would become. By the 1940s it was a retreat for social elites, Hollywood, and English royalty; the Duke and Duchess of Windsor stayed here. The tea dances and lavish dinners were, for two decades, the centre of the city’s social life.

The 1968 demolition

The Roney Plaza was demolished in 1968. It is among the more painful losses in a city that lost a great deal before it learned to protect anything — the historic preservation movement that produced the Art Deco District was still more than a decade away.

What replaced it is the Roney Palace condominium and, next door, 1 Hotel South Beach. The name survived the building.

What Roney Palace actually is today

The shared campus

The defining feature is not a floor plan. It is that Roney Palace shares its lobby, beach and amenities directly with 1 Hotel South Beach, operating as a single oceanfront resort campus rather than as a condominium with a hotel neighbour.

For a resident that means arriving through a hotel lobby, using hotel beach service, and having a hotel’s food and beverage operation as the ground floor of daily life.

What residents get

The amenity set is a hotel’s, not a condominium’s: three oceanfront pools along 600 feet of private beach, the Bamford Wellness Spa at 4,500 square feet with twelve treatment rooms, an Anatomy gym, a SoulCycle studio, six restaurants, and a 50,000-square-foot deck.

No 200-unit condominium association could fund that on its own. The economics only work because the cost base is shared with a hotel that is monetising the same assets. That is the genuine, structural advantage here — and it is worth understanding precisely, because it cuts both ways.

The questions a shared campus raises

Sharing a lobby and a beach with a hotel is a commercial relationship governed by documents. A buyer should read them rather than assume the arrangement is permanent or costless.

Who controls the amenities, and who pays

Establish precisely which facilities residents are entitled to, under what instrument — a declaration, a shared-facilities agreement, an easement, or a licence — and whether that entitlement runs with the unit or is revocable. Then establish the cost allocation: what share of the pools, beach service, spa and deck the condominium carries, how that share is calculated, and whether it can be reset.

Ask too whether resident access is unrestricted or subject to hotel demand. During peak season a shared pool deck is shared with paying guests, and buildings handle that very differently.

What happens if the operator changes

This is the question the the W South Beach conversion to Waldorf Astoria made concrete for owners a few blocks away: hotel flags change, and the amenities attached to a flag can change with them.

Ask what happens to the shared-facilities agreement on a change of hotel operator or ownership, whether the condominium has any consent right, and whether the agreement has a term and an expiry. An amenity package that depends on a hotel brand is only as durable as the contract underneath it.

The short-term rental dimension

Buildings on a hotel campus frequently permit shorter rental terms than a conventional condominium. That can be an income advantage — and it also shapes who your neighbours are, what the corridors feel like, and how lenders view the project.

Get the current rental rules in writing, confirm whether they have changed recently, and check the owner-occupancy percentage. High transient use and low owner-occupancy are both Fannie Mae Full Review inputs.

Vintage: the milestone cycle is not approaching, it is here

Under Florida Statute 553.899, condominium buildings three storeys or taller require a milestone structural inspection at 30 years — 25 years within three miles of the coastline — and every 10 years thereafter.

Most of the buildings covered on this site are recent: Piano’s North Beach tower and Nouvel’s bayfront building have two decades before their first inspection. Roney Palace is the opposite case, and that changes the diligence entirely.

What that means in practice

For a building of this era the first milestone is long past due or already done, and the property sits on the recurring ten-year cycle. So the question is not “when is it due” but “what did the last one find.”

Ask for the completed milestone report, and specifically whether Phase 2 was triggered. Ask what work followed, what it cost, how it was funded, and whether any of it remains outstanding. Then ask what the Structural Integrity Reserve Study says about the next cycle. On a building of this vintage that sequence is the entire purchase decision — more than the view, more than the finishes.

Financing — where the vintage bites

Since 3 August 2026, Fannie Mae’s Lender Letter LL-2026-03 has retired the Limited Review path for established condominium projects over ten units. Full Review now applies at every down-payment level, so the lender reads the milestone report, the reserve study, the budget and the master insurance policy. From 4 January 2027, minimum reserves rise from 10% to 15% of annual budgeted assessment income — a change that lands hardest on exactly this vintage.

In June 2026, Miami-Dade condominiums ran 11,550 active listings, 12.3 months of supply and a median down 3.1% to $431,000, with 48.5% of sales closing in cash. A project failing Full Review becomes effectively cash-only and loses roughly half its buyer pool.

For older buildings that is the central risk — and it is also where the opportunity sits. A well-run older building that has completed its milestone work, funded its reserves and documented everything will clear review while its neighbours do not. That difference is not visible from the lobby.

The honest summary

You are buying a hotel-grade amenity package that no condominium of this size could fund alone, on the parcel where Miami Beach’s resort era began, at Collins and 23rd.

What you are underwriting is two documents: the shared-facilities agreement that delivers the amenities, and the milestone and reserve position that determines what the building will cost you. Get both, read both, and this is a distinctive purchase. Skip them and you are buying a lobby.

See also the South Beach market, the wider Miami Beach market and the full Miami’s condominium market market.

Related reading: the Venetian Islands nearby · Nouvel’s Monad Terrace · loft conversions in Miami Beach.