Mirador South Beach

The rise that is not a rise

Qualified sales from the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser record, pulled 17 August 2026 — arm’s-length transactions only.

Read that table quickly and it says the building is up 20.5% per square foot since 2023. Read it slowly and it says something stranger: the price per foot rose while the median price fell, from $395,000 to $370,750 — a drop of 6.1%, and 11.4% if you stop at the last complete year.

Both things can only be true at once if the homes being sold got smaller. They did. The median home sold in 2023 was 837 square feet; in 2026 so far it is 694.

Most buildings cannot be tested for this, because no two homes in them are alike. This one can. 212 of its 408 homes — 52% of the building — are the same 837 square foot floorplate, and another 67 are the same 552 square foot studio. Together those two plates account for 70 of the 88 qualified sales in the last four years, or 80% of them. So the trend can be run on identical homes, and the mix removed entirely.

Held at a constant size, both floorplates fell through 2025. The 837 sq ft homes went $454 to $427, down 5.9%. The studios went $585 to $550, down 6.0%. Two independent series, 15–17 and 5–5 sales apiece, moving the same direction by almost exactly the same amount.

The entire 20.5% gain in the headline table rests on 2026, and 2026 rests on 6 sales, 2 of them on the large plate and 3 on the studio plate. That is not enough to overturn what the two controlled series show through 2025, and I am not going to present it as though it were.

What I would actually tell you: this building has been drifting down on a per-foot basis, and the raw table disguises it because smaller homes have been trading. If 2026 finishes with thirty sales still reading above $427 on the large plate, that changes and I will say so.

What is actually inside the building

The county returns 421 folios at 1200 West Avenue: 408 residential homes and 11 commercial store units, plus a reference folio and one 3,604 sq ft folio the county codes as residential but assesses at $100 — a commercial space wearing a residential code. None of those 11 stores, and neither of the other two, is counted in any figure on this page.

The mix is unusually narrow. 280 one-bedrooms and 95 studios — 92% of the building — against 28 two-bedrooms, 4 three-bedrooms and a single four-bedroom. Heated area runs 552 to 3,604 square feet with a median of 837.

That 837 median is not an average of a spread; it is a floorplate. 212 homes are exactly 837 square feet and 67 are exactly 552 — 279 of 408 homes, or 68%, in just two configurations.

For a buyer this has a specific and underrated consequence: you will have more genuine comparables here than in all but two of the buildings measured for this site. When 212 homes are physically identical, a recent sale down the corridor is evidence about your home, not a loose analogy. Only two buildings measured for this site hold a larger block of identical homes. Buildings with fifty distinct floorplans cannot offer that, and their pricing arguments are correspondingly softer.

The 2026 assessed values run $101,864 to $2,431,955, with a median of $276,971. The top of that range belongs to the single 3,604 sq ft home, which is the outlier of the building in every respect — it also holds the record sale, $3,400,000 in March 2021 at $943 per square foot.

The 2005 sell-out, and what happened next

The county holds 1,009 qualified sales here going back to the beginning of the record, and 362 of them fall in a single year: 2005. That is the sell-out, at a median of $268,900 and $344 per square foot.

2005 was near the top of the last cycle, which makes this building a test of a pattern I have argued elsewhere on this site: that what determined whether a Miami condo buyer made money was less the calendar year than the price paid relative to the asset.

Of the original 2005–06 buyers, 344 have since resold in a measurable arm’s-length transaction. 89 of them — 25.9% — sold for less than they paid. The median outcome across all 344 was +20.6%, over holds that in most cases ran more than fifteen years.

That is a materially better record than the towers that sold small homes at oceanfront prices per foot in the same years, and a materially worse one than the buildings that sold out into the 2009–11 trough. It sits where the entry price says it should: $344 per square foot in 2005 was not a speculative number for Miami Beach, and the outcome is correspondingly ordinary rather than catastrophic.

Across the whole record rather than just the original buyers, the county shows 615 resales, of which 195 — 31.7% — lost money, at a median gain of 17.4% over a 5.3-year median hold.

Turnover runs at about one home in 19 per year, on 88 qualified sales in four years against 408 homes. That is ordinary liquidity: enough trading to price against, not so much that the building is churning.

Where the evidence thins out

Three qualifications, and the first is the important one.

2026 rests on 6 sales. Every figure in the 2026 row of both tables carries that caveat, and the size-controlled table makes it explicit: 2 sales on the large plate and 3 on the studio plate. I have shown the 2026 row rather than suppressing it, but the four-year change computed off it is not a number I would rely on, and the body of this page argues against it.

The county record contains transfers that are not sales. Working through the original-buyer round trips, several 2005 purchases of $500,000 to $1,075,000 record a later transfer at exactly $100. Those are deed transfers — into a trust, between family, out of a foreclosure — and they are not sales. Every figure in the cohort analysis above counts only transactions the county itself flags as qualified and arm’s-length, and only those above $10,000. Counted the other way, with every recorded transfer included, the original-buyer loss rate reads 42.5% instead of 25.9% — which would be a statement about deed paperwork, not about what owners actually got for their homes. One genuine oddity survives the filter and is worth naming: a home recorded at $14,290 in September 2005 and sold for $305,000 in 2020, an apparent +2,034% that almost certainly reflects an unusual original recording rather than a real purchase price.

Building age, storey count, amenities and monthly costs are not in this record and are not stated here. The Property Appraiser knows what each home is, what it is worth and what it sold for. It does not know what the association charges, and I will not guess at it.

Who this building suits

It suits a buyer who wants a Miami Beach address at an entry price, and who is buying a home rather than an appreciation story. A four-year median of $487 per square foot, in a band from $329 to $864, at a median price of $372,500, is among the more accessible ways into this part of the beach.

It suits a buyer who values being able to check the price. With 212 identical homes, you can see exactly what your floorplate has done, in the same year, at the same size — and this page has done it. Very few buildings let you argue from evidence that clean.

It suits an appreciation-led investor poorly, on the current record. Held at constant size, both dominant plates gave ground through 2025. The building is not collapsing — a 5.9% drift over three years is not a crisis — but nothing in the controlled series supports paying up for momentum.

If you are selling here, price against your own floorplate rather than against the building’s headline per-foot figure. That figure is flattered by a shift toward smaller homes, and a buyer’s agent who runs the same size control this page runs will find the $427 figure on the 837 sq ft plate rather than the $581 on the front of the table.

Interested in selling at The Mirador South Beach?

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