Icon South Beach

What is actually inside the building

The Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser holds 276 folios at 450 Alton Road: 274 residences, one commercial folio — the garage, recorded as 206 leased parking spaces — and one reference folio covering the underlying land.

The W South Beach closes 20 August 2026, reopening in 2027 as the Waldorf Astoria; the Waldorf Astoria conversion guide covers what it means.

The note at the top of this page records 290 residences, and observes that broker pages publish 288 and 300. The county holds 274. I am not going to tell you which is right; I will tell you that the county count is the one attached to recorded declarations, and that part of the gap is explained inside the building itself — eight of those 274 folios are homes formed by joining two units, and one of them, Unit PH2 combined with 3606, was two separate residences when the building was first sold. A building can lose units on paper without losing a square foot.

This is a two-bedroom building, decisively. 175 of the 274 homes are two-bedrooms, with 61 three-bedrooms, 30 one-bedrooms and eight larger homes of four to eight bedrooms — those last being the combined residences. Heated area runs 851 to 9,039 square feet, with a median of 1,750.

Four floorplates carry most of the building: 1,933 square feet (32 homes), 2,145 (31), 851 (29) and 1,536 (29). That concentration is what makes the rest of this page possible — there are enough repeat sales of identical homes here to measure the market properly, which is rare.

The 2026 assessed values run $556,276 to $21,911,232, with a median of $1,556,931.

The price record, and the illusion in it

Qualified, arm’s-length sales from the county record, retrieved 20 August 2026.

Read straight, that table says the typical sale here rose from $1,780,000 to $3,200,000 — up 79.8% in three years. It is the kind of number that ends up in a listing presentation.

It is not what happened. Over the same four years the median home that sold went from 1,452 square feet to 2,145 — 47.7% larger. Most of that 79.8% is not price. It is a change in which homes came to market. Median price per square foot, which controls for that, rose 21.3% across the same period — a different claim entirely, and still not the whole story.

This is the single most useful thing I can tell a buyer or a seller about Icon: the headline numbers here are unusually misleading, because the building spans 851 to 9,039 square feet. A year in which three penthouses trade looks like a boom. It is not one.

Is Icon still going up?

The building has enough repeat sales of identical floorplates to answer this properly, so here it is by plate, in median price per square foot.

Four floorplates traded in both 2025 and 2026, and all four are lower per square foot in 2026. The 2,145 square foot plate went from $1,888 to $1,702, down 9.9%. The 1,452 plate is down 10.8%, the 2,158 plate 18.6%, the 1,750 plate 5.5%.

I want to be careful about how much weight that carries. Only the 2,145 square foot plate has more than one sale in each of those two years — three and three. The rest rest on single transactions. So my honest reading is that the direction is probably real and the magnitude is not knowable yet. Four plates moving the same way is more than coincidence; 2026 is seven sales into an incomplete year.

There is a second finding underneath it, and it is the better-evidenced one. The 1,370 square foot plate has nine qualified sales across 2023, 2024 and 2025 — the deepest like-for-like record in the building — and it has gone $1,232, $1,124, $1,131 per square foot. Down 8.2%, and flat for two years. Over exactly the period when the headline median price rose 79.8%.

The small units did better. The 851 square foot plate went $908 to $925 to $1,099, a gain of 21%. The compact two-bedrooms went backwards, the studios went forwards, and the big homes went up and then came off. Anyone who tells you “prices at Icon are up 80%” has not looked at it by floorplate.

One transaction needs flagging rather than using. The highest price in the county record is $20,963,054, dated 31 December 2012, against the combined Unit PH2 and 3606 folio. The county flags it as a qualified multi-parcel sale, but the amount is recorded to the dollar in a way ordinary sales are not, it falls on the last day of a tax year, and it sits at roughly three times what the same folio traded for in 2007. I am publishing the figure and attaching no ranking or price-per-foot to it, because I cannot establish from the public record that it represents a market price for a home.

It is also the oldest of the ten records I track on my most expensive Miami apartments page, unbeaten since 2012.

The building’s clearest large-home story is a different one. Penthouse 1 was sold together with unit 4104 for $12,140,000 in January 2006 and again for $15,000,000 in June 2013 — 10,575 square feet combined, $1,148 then $1,418 per square foot. That pairing has since been broken up: unit 4104 sold on its own for $2,000,000 in August 2025.

Who this building suits

It suits a buyer who wants a two-bedroom on the water in South of Fifth and wants to be able to price it properly. With 175 two-bedroom homes and 53 qualified sales in four years, about one home in twenty-one trades each year — there are real, recent, identical comparables for almost anything you might buy here. That is worth more than it sounds. In most luxury buildings you are guessing.

It suits a buyer chasing the headline appreciation badly. The compact two-bedroom plate that most people actually buy is down 8.2% since 2023, not up 80%, and every plate with sales in both 2025 and 2026 is lower this year. If the case for buying rests on the four-year median, the case is built on a change in sales mix.

For a larger home — the 1,815 and 2,145 square foot plates — the record is genuinely stronger: those rose hard into 2025 and have given some of it back in 2026. That is a normal shape after a fast run, and it is where I would be negotiating hardest right now.

If you are selling here, price against your own floorplate, not against the building. A 2,145 square foot home and a 1,370 square foot home have been moving in opposite directions for three years, and a well-prepared buyer will arrive with the same county record I have used here. Ask me for the comparables on your specific line before you set a number.

Interested in selling at Icon South Beach?

Learn more about selling your condo at Icon South Beach with Josh Stein.

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