Setai South Beach

The hotel owns 51% of this building

This is the first thing I would tell anyone considering a purchase here, and it is not in any listing.

The Setai’s declaration is recorded at the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser as 162 folios. One hundred and fifty-nine of them are residences. The other three are not:

• Unit HU — the hotel. 309,928 square feet, recorded with an undivided interest of 51.21998% in the common elements.
• Unit CU — a commercial store unit, 11,898 square feet, 1.966313%.
• Unit UU — a 50 square foot utility unit, 0.008263%.

Add the residences together and they hold under half. The hotel unit alone holds more of this condominium than every apartment in it combined.

I want to be careful about what that does and does not mean, because the county record establishes the share and not its consequences. What the 51.21998% translates into — voting rights, the allocation of assessments, the ability to carry or block a decision — is set by the recorded declaration and its amendments, not by the tax roll. Some declarations weight votes by undivided interest; others do not. I have not read this one and I am not going to tell you what it says.

What I will say is that a buyer here should read that declaration before making an offer, and should ask specifically how common-element votes and assessments are apportioned between the hotel unit and the residences. In a building where one owner holds a recorded majority interest, that is not a technicality. It is the governing fact of the ownership, and it is one that a residence-by-residence price comparison will never surface.

What is actually inside the building

The 159 residences run 767 to 6,208 square feet, with a median of 1,213 — and that median is the number to hold onto, because it makes The Setai unusual. This is a small-apartment building carrying some of the highest prices per square foot in Miami Beach. Most of the buildings that trade near this level are full of 3,000 square foot homes.

The mix is 112 two-bedrooms, 33 one-bedrooms, 13 three-bedrooms and one four-bedroom. Four floorplates carry much of the building: 1,141 square feet (23 homes), 1,316 (20), 767 (16) and 821 (16).

The 2026 assessed values for the residences run $1,360,629 to $21,450,000, with a median of $2,265,532.

The price record, and what set it

Qualified, arm’s-length sales of residences from the county record, retrieved 21 August 2026. The hotel, store and utility folios are excluded.

The first three rows are the story. $2,491, then $2,492, then $2,462 per square foot — three consecutive years inside 1.2% of one another, across 25 sales. I do not often see a building hold a per-foot level that precisely, and in a market where most of the stock I measure has given ground since 2023, holding flat is itself a result.

Ignore the 2026 row. It rests on two sales — an 821 square foot home and a 1,141 square foot home — and one of them cleared at an exceptional per-foot figure. Two transactions cannot move a building from $2,462 to $3,857 and I am not going to present it as though they did. I will re-check it when the year is complete.

The per-foot record is $6,347, set on 26 August 2024 when a 2,521 square foot residence sold for $16,000,000. That is a single-folio sale, so the figure is directly supported by the record rather than derived across combined parcels — which matters, because per-foot records are the number most often got wrong.

The highest price ever recorded here is $27,000,000, on 11 January 2013, for the building’s largest residence at 6,208 square feet — $4,349 per square foot. The same home had sold for $15,000,000 in June 2010: up 80.0% in two and a half years.

One more, because it is the longest clean series in the record. A 2,411 square foot residence formed from two joined units has traded three times: $3,000,000 in April 2010, $5,850,000 in January 2014 and $6,500,000 in August 2023 — $1,244, then $2,426, then $2,696 per square foot. The heavy lifting happened before 2014; the nine years since added 11.1%.

Who this building suits

It suits a buyer who wants hotel-serviced ownership at one of the best-known addresses on Miami Beach and understands they are buying a compact residence at a premium per-foot price. The median home is 1,213 square feet. If you are comparing this building to a 3,000 square foot oceanfront apartment elsewhere on Collins on a price-per-foot basis, you are not comparing like with like — and the flat three-year record suggests the market has been pricing it consistently rather than speculatively.

1 Hotel & Homes South Beach keeps 156 residences behind 600 feet of oceanfront, one of the most luxurious South Beach condos.

It suits a buyer who has not read the declaration very badly. A recorded 51.21998% undivided interest held by the hotel unit is the single most consequential fact about owning here, and it will not appear on a listing sheet or in a comparable-sales report. Ask how votes and assessments are apportioned, ask what the hotel unit’s obligations to the residential owners are, and get the answers in writing before you commit.

For an investor, liquidity is modest — 27 qualified sales in four years, about one home in twenty-four each year — but the price stability is genuinely attractive if you are looking for somewhere to hold value rather than chase appreciation. Three years inside 1.2% is a building doing what it says.

If you are selling here, the flat record is your friend: you can price against 2023, 2024 and 2025 comparables interchangeably, which is rarely true. Do not price off the 2026 rows — two sales, one of them exceptional, and a well-prepared buyer will say so. Ask me for the comparables on your line before you set a number.

Interested in selling at Setai South Beach?

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