The Elser Residences

What Is Actually In The Elser Residences

The Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser lists 650 folios tied to 398 NE 5 St, in the Miami CBD. Of those, 646 are residential condominium units carrying the “398 NE 5th Street Condo” declaration; the remaining four sit in a separate plat parcel and are not part of this condominium at all. The condominium’s own share-of-common-elements declaration sums to 99.9988% across those 646 folios, which is complete for practical purposes.

The bed mix leans heavily toward small units: 102 studios, 372 one-bedrooms, 62 two-bedrooms and 110 three-bedrooms, for a total of 646 homes. Unit size runs from 341 to 2,301 square feet, with a median of just 443 square feet — this is a compact, micro-unit-heavy building, and the 2,301 square-foot maximum is a clear outlier against that median rather than representative of a typical home here.

The county’s 2026 assessed values for these 646 homes range from $206,305 to $1,160,944, with a median of $394,012. I am not able to state the building’s age, its storey count or its amenities from this record — those facts are not part of what the Property Appraiser tracks, and I would rather leave them out than guess.

Four Years Of Sales — And What They Do And Don’t Support

Median sale price and median price per square foot disagree here, and that disagreement is worth sitting with rather than smoothing over. Median price rose from $768,500 in 2023 to $1,280,000 in 2024, then fell to $1,154,000 in 2025 and $420,000 in the nine sales recorded so far in 2026. Median $/sq ft, by contrast, has declined in every single year of this table — $1,635, then $1,437, then $1,230, then $1,105, a steady 32.4% drop from 2023 through the 2026 sales on record. A building this size sells a wide range of floorplans in any given year, and median price simply reflects which sizes happened to close, not whether value per foot went up or down. The $/sq ft line is the one I would trust to describe direction; the price line is not measuring the same thing year to year.

With 461 qualified sales across the four-year window, this is not a thin record — it easily clears the bar for describing a direction with confidence on 2023 through 2025. 2026 is a different matter: only nine qualified sales have closed so far this year, the year is incomplete, and I would treat the $1,105 median $/sq ft as directionally consistent with the three-year decline but not yet reliable as a number in its own right. The direction is probably real; the size of the 2026 figure is not.

One more thing this table shows plainly: 2023 alone accounts for 323 of the 461 total qualified sales in this four-year window — a level of activity no other year here comes close to, and roughly half of every sale recorded across the whole period. I don’t have a documented reason for that concentration in the county record, and I’m not going to guess at one; I’ll simply note that it happened and that it is the largest single driver of this table’s shape.

Is The Elser’s High Turnover A Strength Or A Warning Sign?

Averaged across the four-year window, this building recorded 115.25 qualified sales a year against 646 homes — one home in six changing hands every year. That is an unusually high turnover rate for a condominium; most buildings I track see far fewer of their units trade in any given year. High turnover cuts two ways. For a buyer, it means genuine, frequent comparable sales to price against, and it means liquidity on the way out — you are not likely to be stuck marketing into a market with no recent transactions to point to. For a buyer looking for exclusivity or long ownership tenure among their neighbors, the same number reads differently: a meaningful share of this building’s owners are not staying long.

The building’s most expensive recorded sales are also worth a specific note. The three highest qualified sales I can confirm — $1,878,200 on 12/19/2023, $1,850,900 on 8/30/2023, and $1,841,700 on 9/3/2024 — all involve the identical 983 square-foot floorplan, working out to $1,874, $1,883 and $1,911 per square foot. That is well above the building’s overall $/sq ft band in this table, which has run $1,105 to $1,635. Whatever this specific 983 square-foot layout is, it has consistently commanded a real premium over the building’s typical unit.

Who The Elser Suits, And Who It Doesn’t

The data points toward an investor- and renter-friendly building: three in four homes here are studios or one-bedrooms, the median unit is 443 square feet, assessed values are modest for downtown Miami at a $394,012 median, and turnover is high. That combination suits a buyer prioritizing liquidity, a lower entry price point, and rental demand near Miami’s central business district over space or long-term exclusivity. It suits badly a buyer who wants a full-size family residence — only 110 of 646 homes are even three-bedroom, and the building’s overall size profile is compact throughout.

If you are selling here, the high turnover I described above is a double-edged fact worth taking seriously: it means there is real, recent comparable data to support your price, but it also means you are competing against a steady, ongoing supply of other sellers in the same building rather than a scarce one. Pricing precisely against the most recent comparable sales — not against 2023’s stronger $/sq ft numbers — is where I would start that conversation.

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The Elser Residences Miami Amenities

• Lobby with Cocktail Bar and Restaurant by Jaguar Sun®

• Over 19,000 square foot double height amenity deck overlooking Downtown Miami and Biscayne Bay

• Curated art and green walls throughout all common areas

• 132-Foot Resort Style Pool with private lounge areas

• 16 ft Poolside Screening LED Wall

• Lawn with Theate

• Sky Entertainment Lounge & Grilling Terrace featuring eight grills

• Temperature Controlled Oversized Swim Spa

• Owners Lounge with catering kitchen

• Two-level Coworking Lab featuring 11 reserverable conference rooms

• Coffee Lounge by Cafe Domino®

• Complimentary wifi in common areas

https://youtu.be/3SfKd34sT98

The Elser Residences Miami Prices

Residences from $600,000 USD

– Studios from $600K

– One Bedrooms from $800K

– Two bedrooms from $1.4M

– Three bedrooms from $1.4M

Payment structure:
1. 10% deposit required with Reservation
2. 40% deposit required with Contract (estimate July 2022)
3. Balance at closing (estimate August-September 2022)