Boulan South Beach

What the county records at 220 21st Street

A note on the pull first, because it matters. Searching the county by street address at 220 21st Street returns 54 folios spread across three different plats — a hazard of address-based searching that would have put two unrelated parcels into this building’s figures. Grouped properly, the declaration is BOULAN SOUTH BEACH CONDO and it holds 52 folios. Its common-element shares close at 100.0054%, so the pull is complete.

All 52 folios are classified RESIDENTIAL — TOTAL VALUE : CONDOMINIUM — RESIDENTIAL. There is no lodging classification anywhere in this declaration, and no commercial folio either — unusual for a building presented as a condo-hotel, and worth knowing.

The homes run 671 to 1,937 square feet with a median of 996. The dominant plan is 1,000 sq ft, repeated 17 times, followed by 856 sq ft (nine units), then 671, 941, 750 and 995 sq ft. The mix is nine studios, 40 one-bedrooms and three two-bedrooms.

For 2026 the county assesses the condominium at $25,201,568, a median of $468,960 per home across a range of $307,117 to $1,203,587.

Twenty homes, one day, one package

The record holds 49 qualified transactions, and their distribution is lopsided: 19 in 2011 and 12 in 2012, then a long thin tail. But the qualified sales are not the whole story here, and reading only those would have led me to publish something false.

My first pass showed 20 of the 52 homes with no qualified sale on record and I nearly wrote that they had never sold. They had. Going back to the raw transaction rows shows all twenty transferred on the same day:

24 February 2016 — 20 folios, $16,852,900 in total, every one flagged by the county as unqualified, with the description “Transfer where the sale price is verified to be part of a package.”

That is the county telling you, in its own words, that these prices are not evidence of market value. And those twenty folios carry no other transaction of any kind — not before 2016, not since. Thirty-eight per cent of this building moved once, as a block, a decade ago, and has not moved individually at all.

I have excluded all twenty from every price figure on this page, which is the only defensible treatment. But the fact of them belongs on the page rather than in a footnote, because it means a buyer here is looking at a building where a large minority of the homes are held together and have no individual price history whatsoever. What that means for the character of the place, how it is run, or what might happen next, the county record does not say — and I am not going to guess.

What actually trades here, and at what price

Set the package aside and what remains is one of the quietest sale records in this section.

Two qualified sales in four years, against 52 homes. That is a turnover rate of roughly one home in 104 per year — the lowest of any building in this section by a wide margin. Nothing sold in 2024 and nothing has sold so far in 2026.

The two that did sell were a 941 sq ft home at $615,000 in July 2023 and a 1,000 sq ft home at $610,000 in March 2025. Two transactions cannot establish a trend, and I am not going to draw one from them. What is mildly reassuring is that they agree with each other in absolute terms; what is not is that the per-foot figures, $654 and $610, straddle a gap I cannot resolve on this evidence.

Widening out helps a little. The median last-sale year across the 32 homes with an arm’s-length price on record is 2012 — fourteen years ago. The building’s recorded high is $1,600,000 for a 1,324 sq ft home in May 2022, at $1,208 per square foot, which is well above anything that has traded since. And the county now assesses the typical home at 0.76 times what its owner last paid.

Taken together, the honest reading is that this building has no usable current price record. Not a falling one, not a rising one — an absent one.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

The homes here are a decent size for South Beach — a median just under 1,000 square feet, mostly proper one-bedrooms rather than studios — and the assessed values suggest a price point well below the oceanfront buildings in this section. If you want space rather than a nightly-rental proposition, that combination has something going for it.

It suits you badly if liquidity matters at all. One sale every two years across a 52-home building means that when you want out, you will be waiting for a market that barely exists. And it suits you badly if you want to know what you are buying into: with 20 homes held as a package and the median individual sale fourteen years old, there is very little here to price against.

On short-term rental: nothing in this declaration is classified as lodging, and that establishes nothing either way — a use code is a tax assessment category, not a permission. Florida’s state preemption, the City of Miami Beach’s zoning and licensing rules, and the condominium declaration together decide it. Miami Beach enforces aggressively. Confirm all three with your own lawyer before you rely on rental income.

If you are selling here, you have almost no comparables working against you, which cuts both ways — there is equally little to support your asking price. Your strongest evidence is the 2023 and 2025 sales and your own plan’s size. Be realistic about the timeline: on the recent rate, a given home in this building sells about once a century.

Interested in selling at Boulan South Beach?

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