Short-Term Rental Condos in Miami: How to Check If a Building Really Allows It

By Josh Stein — Miami real estate sales associate, Florida license SL3057661. Selling Miami luxury property since 2002, with more than $1 billion closed.

This page used to be a list. It named five Miami condo buildings and said they allowed
Airbnb. I have taken the list down, because when I went and checked it against the public record,
most of it did not hold up — and because the rules underneath it are moving quickly enough that any
list I publish today is a liability by next season.

What follows is the thing the list was pretending to be: the actual test. If you are buying a Miami
condo with short-term rental income in the plan, this is how you find out whether that plan is legal
in that specific building, and what it costs you if you get it wrong.

Three rules, and all three have to say yes

Almost every bad short-term rental decision I see in Miami comes from checking one layer and
assuming it covers the others. There are three, they are independent, and each one can kill the plan
on its own.

Layer one — Florida state law. Section 509.032(7)(b) of the Florida Statutes
preempted the regulation of vacation rentals to the state. A Florida city or county cannot pass a new
ordinance banning short-term rentals outright, or regulating how long or how often you may rent.
But that preemption only applies to ordinances adopted after 1 June 2011. Anything a
local government already had on its books on that date was grandfathered and remains fully
enforceable — including outright prohibitions in residential zones. The Florida Attorney General has
issued formal opinions on exactly this grandfather provision.

That single date is why the rules feel arbitrary as you drive across Miami. They are not
arbitrary. They are a snapshot of which municipalities happened to have regulated vacation rentals
before June 2011, frozen in place, with everyone else preempted since.

Layer two — the municipality. Miami-Dade County requires a Certificate of Use
before a property is listed or advertised on any platform, renewed annually, displayed with the
responsible party’s name and the maximum occupancy. Operating without one draws $100 for a first
offence, $1,000 for a second within 24 months and $2,500 for a third. Alongside it you need state
licensing through the Department of Business and Professional Regulation, a Florida Department of
Revenue registration, and a Tourist Tax account for any rental of six months or less.

The county is explicit that this is the floor, not the ceiling: if the property sits inside a
municipality, that municipality’s own rules apply on top. In the City of Miami that means the
property must sit in a transect zone where lodging is a permitted use under Miami 21, and you must
hold a City Certificate of Use and a Business Tax Receipt — and to get the Certificate of Use, the
building’s Certificate of Occupancy has to reflect approval for lodging in the first place. Miami
Beach, which is a grandfathered jurisdiction, runs one of the most restrictive regimes in the state:
its land development regulations prohibit rentals of less than six months and one day across large
parts of the city, and the penalties for operating illegally are measured in tens of thousands of
dollars rather than hundreds.

Layer three — the condominium itself. This is the one buyers skip, and it is the
one that binds you personally. A condominium’s recorded declaration and its rules and regulations
can impose a minimum lease term, cap how many times a year a unit may be let, require board approval
of every tenant, or forbid transient occupancy altogether. None of that is affected by
zoning. A building can sit in a transect zone that permits lodging, hold every licence the
city asks for, and still have a declaration that says the minimum lease is one year. The declaration
wins.

What does the county record actually tell you?

There is one check you can run yourself, free, in about two minutes, and it is worth running
early — but only if you understand precisely what it does and does not establish.

Every folio in Miami-Dade carries a Department of Revenue use classification, which is how the
Property Appraiser categorises the property for assessment. Most Miami condo towers, including the
ones people most often assume are Airbnb-friendly, are classified
RESIDENTIAL : CONDOMINIUM – RESIDENTIAL. A building genuinely built and recorded as
lodging looks different, and it looks different consistently across the whole declaration rather than
on one or two folios.

The contrast is easy to see. Smart
Brickell has fifty units recorded under a declaration literally named SMART BRICKELL LODGING 1 CONDO, and every one of those folios carries HOTEL OR MOTEL : CONDOMINIUM. That is what the classification looks like when the lodging use is baked into the building at the county level. Pull a conventional residential tower and you will not see it on any folio.

And immediately, a warning about how easily this check misleads. That same tower also contains fifty ordinary residential homes, from floor 11 up, under a completely separate declaration classified RESIDENTIAL : CONDOMINIUM – RESIDENTIAL — and a county search on the street address returns only the lodging half. One building, two declarations, two different sets of rules, and the obvious query shows you one of them. I set the whole structure out on the Smart Brickell page. Never conclude anything about a building from a single address pull.

Now the other direction, and it is the half most people never check. District 225, at 225 N Miami Avenue, was financed on a construction loan reported at the time as funding Airbnb-branded condominiums. Its homes were delivered furnished specifically so they could be let, the floorplans were designed around it, and a professional operator runs the short-term rental programme. And all 343 of its homes are recorded by the county as ordinary RESIDENTIAL : CONDOMINIUM – RESIDENTIAL, with no lodging classification anywhere in the declaration. One building carries the lodging code and is a condo-hotel; the other carries the residential code and is a purpose-built short-term rental tower. The classification therefore fails as a test in both directions — it is worth knowing, and it settles nothing.

Which brings us to the limit, and it matters more than the check. The use code is an assessment
classification. It is not a permit, not a licence, and not a statement about what any individual owner
is allowed to do. It tells you how the Property Appraiser treats the property for tax purposes, which
is a genuine signal about how the building was conceived and recorded — and nothing more. A lodging
classification does not grant you the right to rent by the night; a residential classification does
not by itself prove you cannot. It narrows the question. It does not answer it.

I am spelling that out because the version of this page I replaced made precisely the opposite
mistake in the opposite direction: it took a general impression about a handful of buildings and
published it as permission. If you want the underlying sales record for any Miami building, the
Miami Condo Index is where I keep the
county-verified numbers.

What enforcement looked like in August 2026

For most of the last decade this was a theoretical risk. In August 2026 it stopped being
theoretical, in a way every Miami condo buyer should read carefully.

On 11 August 2026, Miami Assistant City Manager Barbie Hernandez wrote to
The Club at
Brickell Bay, a 43-storey, 643-unit tower at 1200 Brickell Bay Drive completed in 2005, ordering
it to cease short-term rentals. The city’s position, as reported by The Real Deal, is that the
building holds an improper Business Tax Receipt, an improper Certificate of Occupancy and two improper
Certificates of Use, and that inspectors found more than 300 units operating as vacation
rentals against 30 the building was authorised for. The letter’s language was not hedged:
“It is clear your building is being operated as a transient public lodging
establishment,” Hernandez wrote, adding that the operation
“creates a significant life safety issue” because the building is not approved for
the fire, life-safety and disability requirements that apply to lodging.

The association disputes it. In its written response, reported by CBS News Miami on
21 August 2026, the association “denies operating a lodging or hotel establishment”
while acknowledging the city’s concerns. Board chair Maria Sindia Borras said the board
“intends to work cooperatively with the City to resolve any misunderstandings” and
requested a 90-day grace period. Nothing here has been adjudicated. I am setting out what the city
alleges and what the association answers, because both are on the record and a buyer is entitled to
weigh them.

What I want you to take from it is not a verdict on one building. It is the structure of the risk.
The exposure in that dispute does not sit with a platform or with a guest. It sits with the
association — which means it sits with every owner, through the assessments that fund the legal
defence and any remediation the city ultimately requires. You can buy into that exposure
without ever renting your own unit for a single night. If you want the longer version of how
this is playing out across Brickell, I wrote it up separately in
when
a condo becomes a hotel.

How to check a specific building before you offer

Here is the sequence I actually run. It takes an afternoon and it is cheaper than any of the
alternatives.

1. Establish the jurisdiction first. Not “Miami” — the specific municipality.
The City of Miami, Miami Beach, Bal Harbour, Sunny Isles Beach, Surfside and unincorporated
Miami-Dade are six different regimes. Brickell and Downtown are City of Miami. South Beach and
Mid-Beach are Miami Beach, which is grandfathered and strict. Get this wrong and everything after it
is wrong.

2. Read the declaration, not the listing. Ask the seller or the association for the
recorded declaration of condominium, the rules and regulations, and any amendments. Read the leasing
article. Look for a minimum lease term, a cap on lettings per year, an approval requirement and any
transient-occupancy language. If a listing says short-term rentals are permitted and the declaration
says the minimum lease is six months, the declaration is the one a court reads.

3. Read the last twelve months of board minutes and the current budget. This is the
step almost nobody takes and it is the highest-yield one. Enforcement, fines, city correspondence and
special assessments show up in the minutes long before they show up in a listing. So does a legal
line-item that has quietly tripled.

4. Check the building’s licences, not the unit’s. In the City of Miami, ask
whether the building’s Certificate of Occupancy reflects approval for lodging use. That is the
document the Certificate of Use depends on, and it is a building-level fact — an individual owner
cannot cure it.

5. Put the answer in the contract. If short-term rental income is material to your
underwriting, make the purchase contingent on written confirmation from the association and the
municipality, obtained inside the inspection period. A verbal assurance from anyone — including an
agent, including me — is not diligence.

6. Underwrite the deal without the short-term income. If the building only works
with nightly rates, you are not buying real estate, you are buying a regulatory position that three
separate authorities can revise. Run the numbers on an annual lease. If it still works, the
short-term upside is upside. If it does not, you have found your answer.

Who this suits, and who it does not. Buyers who want a genuine condo-hotel product
should look at buildings conceived and recorded that way from the start, where the lodging use is in
the declaration and the operator is in place — you give up some control and some yield to a management
agreement, and in exchange the legal foundation is not something you are hoping holds. Buyers who
want a residence that occasionally pays for itself are usually better served by a building with a
clear, conservative leasing rule they can live with. And if you are selling a unit in a
building where a large share of the stock has quietly gone short-term, understand that a 2026 buyer’s
lender and lawyer will both look at that, and price the file accordingly. That is a real
change from three years ago.

The honest summary: Miami has genuine short-term rental opportunities, and they are narrower,
more specific and more paperwork-dependent than the internet suggests. Anyone handing you a list of
five buildings — including the version of this page I just replaced — is skipping the part that
decides it.