Ocean Place

What is actually inside the building

Start with the thing that makes this building hard to look up. Ocean Place is a single condominium recorded at two street addresses: 226 Ocean Drive and 225 Collins Avenue. The Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser holds 26 folios at the first and 24 at the second, all under one declaration and one set of common-element shares. Search either address on its own and you will be shown about half the building, with everything you find internally consistent and nothing to warn you.

Of the 50 folios, 48 are homes. The other two are an aggregate reference folio for the underlying land and a single 800 square foot commercial unit, and both are excluded from every figure below.

The homes run 723 to 2,786 square feet, with a median of 1,064, mostly small apartments. Nineteen of the 48 are one-bedrooms and 26 are two-bedrooms, with three three-bedrooms. Six floorplates cover more than half of it: 1,091 square feet (5 homes), 723 (5), 942 (5), 1,000 (4), 1,245 (4) and 732 (4).

The county files the building in two phases, labelling units PH I and PH II — roughly the two addresses — and four of the 48 homes are combined residences, single apartments made from two original units and still recorded under both numbers.

The 2026 assessed values run $410,820 to $4,039,862, with a median of $1,019,162.

The price record, and why one apartment distorts it

Qualified, arm’s-length sales from the county record, retrieved 23 September 2026.

The 2023 row is one apartment. A single home sold that year — the largest in the building at 2,786 square feet, against a building median of 1,064 — for $4,200,000. There is no median in a sample of one, and a reader who takes $4,200,000 as what a home here costs would be out by a factor of three.

The same apartment sold again in November 2025, for $5,250,000, and that is the building’s record sale. So one of the 48 homes accounts for two of the eight qualified sales in the four-year record. Strip it out and the other six run from $697,500 to $1,785,000.

Per square foot the picture is much steadier: $1,508, $1,288, $1,229, $1,316 — and the 2023 figure is high for the same reason the price is. My honest reading is that this building has traded in the $1,200 to $1,350 per square foot range since 2024 and that eight sales cannot tell you anything more than that. I would not draw a direction through it. The apparent 12.7% fall from 2023 to 2026 is the difference between one large apartment and one ordinary one.

Eight qualified sales in four years across 48 homes is about one home in twenty-four each year. That is close to the median of one in 23 across my Miami Condo Index, and with only one or two apartments coming up in a year it is the defining practical fact about buying here.

What happened to the people who bought at the conversion

The building sold as condominiums in 2003 and 2004, and that cohort is unusually well documented.

Forty of the 48 homes have a complete round trip in the county record: bought and later sold, both legs qualified arm’s-length transactions, measured from the first recorded sale to the latest. All forty gained. The median outcome is +104.7%, over a median holding period of 15.2 years, with a range from +9.8% to +360.3%.

Four at the top:

• A 1,674 square foot combined residence bought for $282,400 in August 2004 sold for $1,300,000 in June 2018 — up 360.3%.
• A 1,091 square foot home bought for $464,900 in June 2004 sold for $1,785,000 in March 2024 — up 284.0% over 19.8 years.
• A 942 square foot home bought for $264,900 in July 2004 sold for $885,500 in September 2024 — up 234.3%.
• A 1,037 square foot home bought for $414,000 in April 2003 sold for $1,355,000 in April 2025 — up 227.3% over 22.1 years.

I want to be plain about what that record does and does not mean. It measures each home from its first sale to its latest, and the median hold behind it is 15.2 years, across a period in which Miami Beach prices rose a great deal. Fifteen years of holding is doing most of the work here. Counted resale by resale instead, the picture is less one-sided: of 90 resales, 12 sold below the previous price (13.3%, with losses from -0.7% to -33.3%), and the median resale gained 33.4% over a 4.0-year hold. Four more chains were broken by a foreclosure and are left out. The right conclusion is that nobody who bought at the conversion and held to the latest sale has been caught out; it is not that a short hold here is safe, because 3 of the 37 resales held under three years lost money.

The building’s largest apartment gives the clearest single thread through the whole period: $1,609,800 in January 2003, $2,250,000 in April 2014, $4,200,000 in September 2023, $5,250,000 in November 2025 — four qualified transactions on one home across twenty-three years. The county record shows transactions and not reasons, so it cannot say what drove any of them.

Who this building suits

It suits a buyer who wants a smaller home in South of Fifth and is not in a hurry. With one home in twenty-four trading each year, there may be one or two apartments available in the entire building in any given year, and no guarantee that either is the size you want.

It suits a buyer who values a long, unbroken ownership record. Forty completed round trips in a 48-home building is close to total coverage, and every one of them is positive from first sale to latest. You can see most of what ownership has actually produced here.

It suits a buyer looking for a short-term trade badly. The median holding period behind those forty gains is 15.2 years. Resale by resale, 37 of the 90 resales were held under three years and 3 of those sold below the previous price, and the building’s liquidity means an exit may take time regardless of price.

It also suits anyone who intends to do their own homework, provided they know to look in two places. If you check only 226 Ocean Drive, or only 225 Collins Avenue, you will see half the building — and half of a condominium reads as a complete one.

If you are selling here, the comparable set is thin and easy to misuse in both directions. A buyer’s agent reaching for the building median will land on a number distorted by one very large apartment; an agent reaching for the per-foot figure will land somewhere near $1,300. Price against your own floorplate and your own square footage, and be ready to explain why the 2023 headline is not your comparable. Ask me for the per-foot record on your line before you set a number.

Interested in selling at Ocean Place?

Learn more about selling your condo at Ocean Place with Josh Stein.

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