Fontainebleau Miami Beach

What is actually in the building

The county returns 463 folios at 4401 Collins Avenue under the subdivision Fontainebleau II Condo. 461 are homes. The other two are commercial and excluded from everything below: one store folio the county records with a square footage of minus one — plainly a defect in the roll rather than a measurement, and flagged here rather than quietly dropped — and one hotel-classified folio recorded at a single square foot.

The mix is 229 studios, 230 one-bedrooms and two four-bedrooms. That is very nearly a 50/50 split between studios and one-bedrooms, with almost nothing else. Six floorplates carry 458 of the 461 homes: 113 homes at 526 sq ft, 113 at 1,002, and 58 each at 491, 516, 980 and 1,066 sq ft. If you are pricing a purchase here, an exact comparable almost certainly exists.

The size range is where this building gets strange. The homes run from 491 sq ft to 4,500 sq ft, median 980 — a spread of more than eight to one. But that top figure belongs to exactly two homes. 459 of the 461 homes measure between 491 and 1,528 sq ft; then there is a 2,972 sq ft gap; then the two penthouses at 4,500 sq ft each. There is no middle here at all. Any average that spans that gap describes a home that does not exist in this building, and I have kept the two apart throughout.

The 2026 assessments show the same shape: $510,971 to $9,094,564, median $812,430 — a spread of 17.8 times, driven almost entirely by the two penthouses, which the county assesses at $9,094,564 each.

The price record

Across four years that is 37 qualified sales out of 461 homes, a median of $1,609 per square foot in a band from $1,143 to $3,111, and a median price of $955,000.

Four years is a short window for a building this thin, and the table above shows why. My rule is that a direction needs at least five qualified sales in both the opening and closing year. 2023 clears it with seven, and 2026 now clears it at exactly five. On those numbers the rate per foot moved from $1,629 to $1,609, a change of −1.2%, which I read as flat rather than as a direction: a five-sale median in an incomplete year, in a building where the smallest home is 491 sq ft and the largest 4,500, can move by hundreds of dollars per foot on mix alone.

Note also the 2023 median price of $1,500,000 against 2024’s $925,000. That is not a crash. Seven sales in 2023 included both penthouses at $14,000,000 and $13,000,000, which drags a seven-item median upward; per square foot the two years are within about 3% of each other. This is precisely why I lead with price per square foot rather than price.

What the record does support is that this is a very illiquid building. Turnover runs at one home in 50 per year against a median of one in 24 across the buildings in my Miami Condo Index, which is among the slowest in that index. In an average year about nine of these 461 homes change hands. That has consequences in both directions, and I set them out below.

Two identical penthouses, one day, two completely different outcomes

On 2 March 2023 both of this building’s penthouses closed. PH South sold for $14,000,000 and PH North for $13,000,000. They are the same size — 4,500 sq ft each — the county assesses them identically at $9,094,564, and they sold within a million dollars of each other on the same day. By any measure they are the same asset.

Their owners had wildly different decades.

Same home, same building, same exit day, and one owner made twenty-two times what the other made. Nothing about the property explains it. The entire difference is that one bought in 2005 and the other bought in 2008, near the top — and PH South’s own history shows the run it was chasing: $3,990,000 in July 2005, $6,400,000 in March 2007, then $12,500,000 in April 2008. That last buyer paid more than three times the 2005 price and then waited fifteen years to clear 12%.

I keep finding versions of this across Miami and it is the single most useful thing the county record has taught me: on the evidence, when an owner bought has mattered far more than what they bought. It is rare to see it demonstrated this cleanly, by two identical homes closing on the same afternoon.

The building’s wider resale record is mostly gains: across 365 resales, 20.3% sold at a loss, with a median gain of 28.1% over a median hold of 5.4 years. 359 of the building’s homes recorded their first qualified sale in 2005, before the worst of the peak pricing, and that early entry is a large part of why the record here reads better than at towers that sold out three years later.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

It suits a buyer who wants a small, well-comped home on the oceanfront and is not in a hurry. The floorplates repeat heavily, so you can price a purchase properly; the resale record is mostly gains; and at a four-year median of $955,000 the studios and one-bedrooms here are within reach of buyers who cannot get near an oceanfront three-bedroom.

It suits badly anyone who might need to sell quickly. One home in 50 per year is very thin. About nine of these 461 homes trade in an average year, and in 2026 so far the count is five. If your circumstances could change inside three years, that illiquidity is a real risk and it is not offset by anything in this record.

It also suits badly anyone who wants space. There is no middle in this building — you are choosing between homes under 1,528 sq ft and two penthouses that trade in eight figures. If you want a 2,000 sq ft oceanfront home, it does not exist here.

If you are selling here, the thin market is your central problem and your central advantage. With so few comparables closing each year, a buyer’s agent has very little to argue with — but equally, you may wait a long time for the right buyer, and one badly priced neighbouring sale will set the tone for a year. Price off your own floorplate, of which there are likely 57 or 112 others, and ignore the building-wide median entirely: it is pulled around by two penthouses that have nothing to do with your home.

Interested in selling at Fontainebleau?

Learn more about selling your condo at Fontainebleau with Josh Stein.

I'M READY