Bentley Beach Hilton

What the county records at 101 Ocean Drive

The Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser holds 115 folios at 101 Ocean Drive, all in one declaration, BENTLEY BEACH CONDO. The common-element shares close complete once a single plain error in the roll is set aside, so the pull is whole.

110 of those folios are saleable homes, and every one is classified RESIDENTIAL — TOTAL VALUE : CONDOMINIUM — RESIDENTIAL. The declaration does contain four HOTEL OR MOTEL folios, but they are commercial condominium units, not apartments. So on the county’s own classification, there is no lodging-classified residence in this building at all — which is worth stating on a page that sits in a condo-hotel section.

The apartments are small. The median is 462 square feet and the largest is 1,880. The roll’s smallest entry reads 282 square feet, but that is folio 02-4203-272-1140 — the same folio carrying the 2004 multi-parcel deed discussed below, and it is assessed at $1,927,202, which no 282 square foot apartment would be. I treat its recorded area as unreliable rather than as the building’s true minimum. Excluding it, the smallest home on the roll is 300 square feet. The repeated plans cluster tightly at the bottom of the range — 400 sq ft (12 units), then 300, 302, 365, 382 and 385 sq ft at six units each. The mix is 56 studios, 47 one-bedrooms and seven two-bedrooms.

For 2026 the county assesses the condominium at $76,241,107, a median of $536,112 per home across a range of $361,830 to $5,803,097. A median assessment above half a million dollars on a median 462 square feet is the clearest single indication of what this address is worth per foot.

A building that has almost stopped trading

The record holds 223 qualified transactions going back to 2003. Seventy-eight of them closed in 2004 — the original sell-out — and 39 more in 2005. The last decade looks nothing like that.

There have been no qualified sales at this building at all in 2026. I would rather put that in bold than publish a three-year table and let you assume the fourth row was an oversight. The most recent arm’s-length transaction on record closed on 9 May 2025.

Nine sales across four years against 110 homes is a turnover rate of about one home in 49 per year. Look at it from the other direction and it is starker still: the median last-sale year across all 110 residences is 2009. The typical apartment here last changed hands seventeen years ago, and nine of the 110 have no individual qualified sale on record at all — they have never traded singly since the building was created.

One consequence worth spelling out. The county now assesses the median home at 1.39 times what that home last sold for. That is not a claim about appreciation; on sales that are a median of seventeen years old it is mostly just elapsed time. It is a warning about comparables: the last recorded price on most apartments here is too old to price against.

What the few recent sales actually establish

Nine sales is not enough to establish a direction and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The 2024 median sits below 2023 and above 2025 on two and three transactions respectively; that is what small samples do, not a market turning twice.

What nine sales can establish is a level, and the level here is high. The 2023–25 band runs $1,100 to $1,781 per square foot, with a median of $1,423. Individual recent trades: a 715 sq ft home at $1,064,000 in October 2023 ($1,488/sf), a 1,067 sq ft home at $1,900,000 in March 2023 ($1,781/sf), a 300 sq ft studio at $475,000 in October 2024 ($1,583/sf) and a 710 sq ft home at $980,000 in May 2025 ($1,380/sf).

That is roughly double the per-foot level of most buildings in this section. It is what South of Fifth oceanfront costs, and it is being paid on some of the smallest apartments in Miami Beach.

One deed has to be handled rather than used. The record carries a $6,500,000 transaction dated 1 August 2004 against a 282 square foot folio. Divided by that area it would print as $23,050 per square foot, which would be the highest figure ever published for a Miami apartment and would be entirely fictitious — the county’s own description marks it as a deed including more than one parcel. I have kept it as a transaction and published no per-foot figure for it. The building’s genuine per-foot record is $3,138, set by a 1,880 sq ft home at $5,900,000 in March 2016.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

This suits a buyer who wants an oceanfront South of Fifth base, is buying it to use, and can accept a small apartment at a high price per foot. On that basis the address does most of the work and the building’s illiquidity barely matters.

It suits you badly if you need to be able to sell. A building with nine sales in four years and none at all this year is one where your exit depends on a very small number of buyers appearing. It also suits you badly if you want to price with confidence before you offer — with a median last sale in 2009, most units in this building have no useful recent comparable of their own.

On short-term rental: nothing in the county record supports a rental right here, and the residential classification of all 110 homes establishes nothing either way. Florida’s state preemption, the City of Miami Beach’s zoning and licensing rules — among the strictest in the state — and the condominium declaration decide it together. Get all three confirmed by your own lawyer before you rely on any rental income.

If you are selling here, the scarcity is genuinely on your side, and the recent band is strong. Price against the 2023–25 per-foot cluster rather than against your own purchase, which on the typical unit here is more than a decade and a half old. And be realistic about time on market: three sales a year across 110 homes means your buyer may simply not be in the market yet.

Interested in selling at Bentley Beach Hilton?

Learn more about selling your condo at Bentley Beach Hilton with Josh Stein. 

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