Azure Condos

What is actually in the building

The county returns 82 folios for 9401 Collins Avenue. 73 are homes. One is a reference folio, and eight are cabanas — units CA1 to CA8, between 149 and 195 sq ft, which the county classifies as residential but which are plainly not residences: it assesses them between $93,438 and $115,850 against a median of $1,454,290 for a home here. They are excluded from every figure below, and I mention them because a buyer will eventually be shown one and told it is a comparable at this address.

The homes run from 1,246 sq ft to 4,965 sq ft, median 1,910. There is no small stock at all — nothing under 1,246 sq ft, no studios. The bedroom mix leans heavily large: 41 three-bedrooms, 20 two-bedrooms and 10 one-bedrooms, plus one five-bedroom and one six-bedroom. Six floorplans carry most of the building: 11 homes each at 1,945, 1,910 and 1,614 sq ft, 10 each at 1,246 and 2,485, and nine at 1,676.

For 2026 the county assesses the homes between $436,755 and $4,759,260.

What do you do when nothing has sold for twenty months?

It is worth saying the awkward thing first, in plain language, because most sources will not.

The last qualified, arm’s-length sale of a home in this building was on 18 December 2024 — a 1,945 sq ft three-bedroom at $2,400,000, or $1,234 per square foot. The county records no qualified sales here in 2025 and none in 2026. As I write this in August 2026, that is twenty months without a transaction.

An empty year is a fact, not an omission, and it belongs on the page in bold rather than buried under a table that quietly stops at 2024. It is also not, on its own, bad news. Here is what it does and does not tell you.

What it does not tell you is that values have fallen. A price needs a transaction, and there have not been any. Nobody — not me, not an appraiser, not an automated valuation model — can tell you what a home in this building is worth today from evidence inside this building, because the evidence does not exist. Anyone who quotes you a confident current figure for Azure is extrapolating from somewhere else and should say so.

What it does tell you is that this building almost never trades, and that is a long-standing structural fact rather than a recent event. Five qualified sales in four years against 73 homes works out at about one home in 58 per year. Across the buildings in my Miami Condo Index the median is one in 24, and only one building I measure trades more slowly than this one. Look further back and the pattern holds: this building has recorded ten or fewer sales in every year since its 2005 sell-out, and in most years fewer than six.

The practical consequences are specific.

If you are buying, you will be negotiating without recent comparables and you should price that uncertainty rather than pretend it away. The most recent evidence is the four 2023 sales and one December 2024 sale, spanning $983 to $1,332 per square foot — and the 2024 sale sits near the top of that range, which is the only directional signal the building offers.

If you are selling, expect a long marketing period and understand that you are the price discovery. In a building that trades once every year or two, your sale becomes the comparable for everyone else — which is a reason to be patient rather than to chase a bid.

The price record

No four-year change is published for this building and it carries a dash in my Miami Condo Index — not because the sample is thin but because the final year is empty. There is nothing to compare.

Across the five sales in the four-year window the building cleared a median $1,119 per square foot, in a band from $983 to $1,332, at a median price of $1,875,000. Every one of those five sales is listed above; there is no hidden depth to this record and I would rather show you all of it than summarise it.

The building’s highest price is $7,460,000, paid on 7 July 2021 for a 4,156 sq ft penthouse — $1,795 per square foot, comfortably above anything achieved before or since. It is five years old and it is a penthouse; treat it as the ceiling of the building rather than a benchmark for anything else in it.

The long record is much more encouraging than the recent one. The building sold through in 2005, when 61 homes — 83.6% of the building — changed hands at a median $745,000, or $417 per square foot. Of those original buyers, 41 have since resold and only 6 lost money — 14.6% — at a median gain of 33.3%. Across all 70 resales the county records, 12 lost money, or 17.1%, at a median gain of 36.8% over a 6.9-year hold.

That is a materially better ownership record than most of the buildings I measure, where a quarter to a third of resellers have been underwater. Illiquidity and poor returns are not the same thing, and this building is a good illustration of the difference.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

It suits a buyer who wants a large, quiet, low-density home in Surfside and has no intention of moving again soon. Seventy-three homes, three-bedrooms as the standard product, nothing under 1,246 sq ft, and neighbours who overwhelmingly do not sell.

It suits a buyer who is comfortable making a judgement without a spreadsheet full of comparables, and who can use the scarcity as leverage rather than being unnerved by it.

It suits badly anyone who might need to sell inside five years, or who needs to know what their asset is worth at any given moment. Twenty months without a sale means twenty months without a valuation anchor, and the median hold among resellers here is 6.9 years.

It suits badly a buyer relying on a lender or an appraiser who wants three recent in-building comparables. There are not three. Plan for that before you are under contract, not after.

If you are selling here, two things follow. You have almost no competition — nothing has traded in twenty months, which means no fresh low comparable exists to be used against you. But you also have no recent evidence supporting your price, so build the case from the December 2024 sale at $1,234 per square foot, the 2023 range of $983 to $1,332, and the building’s genuinely strong resale history: 17.1% losses across 70 resales, against a median gain of 36.8%. That last figure is the strongest number this building has, and almost nobody quotes it.