The Pinnacle

What is actually in the building

The county returns 242 folios at 17555 Collins Avenue and every one of them is a home. There is no parking folio, no deeded storage, no cabana, no commercial unit and no reference folio. Most towers I measure carry ten to forty non-residential folios that have to be filtered out before any figure means anything; here nothing does.

The homes run from 1,590 sq ft to 4,020 sq ft, median 1,840 — a building with no small homes in it at all. Three floorplates carry 213 of the 242: 82 homes at 1,840 sq ft, 71 at 1,590 and 60 at 2,090, with 11 more at 1,930, eight at 1,650 and three at 2,250. That is heavy repetition, and it means an exact comparable is available for nearly every home here.

On the bedroom mix I have to flag a defect in the county’s own data rather than repeat it. The roll records 91 two-bedrooms and 139 three-bedrooms, which is consistent with the floor areas. It also records eight homes as six-bedrooms and one as a seven-bedroom — at 1,840 to 2,090 sq ft. A 2,090 sq ft seven-bedroom does not exist. Something in the roll is counting rooms that are not bedrooms, and rather than publish a mix I know to be wrong, I will say plainly: this is a building of two- and three-bedroom homes, and the nine outlying counts should be checked against a floor plan before anyone relies on them.

For 2026 the county assesses the homes between $470,551 and $2,430,258, median $1,181,890. 238 of the 242 measure 2,250 sq ft or less; four larger homes sit above a 1,240 sq ft gap and should be read separately.

The price record

Across four years that is 28 qualified sales, a median of $974 per square foot in a band from $672 to $1,446, and a median price of $1,800,000.

The four-year change is small and rests on thin samples. Nine sales in 2023 and five in 2026 to date meet my rule of five in both years. Per square foot the median went from $1,033 to $978, down 5.3%. With five sales in an incomplete year, treat that as a range around the level, not a trend.

What the four years support is a level of roughly $975 per square foot, and a genuinely volatile path around it. $1,033, then $849, then $988, then $978: a 22% swing between the low and high year in a building where nothing structural changed. With five to nine sales a year in a 242-home tower, which homes happen to trade dominates the median. Note that three of 2024’s seven sales were the 1,590 sq ft plan, while 2025’s median home was 2,090 sq ft: which floorplate trades moves the median.

Turnover runs at one home in 32 per year over the three complete years, 23 sales on 242 homes, so seven or eight of the homes change hands annually. This is a slow building.

The building where holding period decided everything

212 qualified sales closed here in 1998 and 1999 — 85 and 127 — which is the original sell-out. The county’s record for the building runs to 712 qualified sales and 467 resales, enough to separate the cohorts properly.

Read the first row against the last and you have this building’s whole story. An original buyer who sold at some point in the twenty-seven years since had a one-in-four chance of losing money. An original buyer who simply held until 2021 or later had no chance of losing money at all — thirteen out of thirteen were up, at a median gain of 181.2%.

The two extremes are both 2,090 sq ft homes, which makes them unusually comparable, and they were separated by six years of entry timing. The best outcome on the record is one bought for $361,400 on 1 November 1998 and sold for $2,100,000 on 12 August 2024 — up 481.1%. The worst is one bought for $2,500,000 on 1 July 2004 and sold for $850,000 on 21 April 2010 — down 66.0%. The first owner paid $173 per square foot; the second paid $1,196, which is above what the building trades at today, twenty-two years later.

That second figure is the more useful one. The 2004 buyer did not lose money because the building was bad. They lost money because they paid $1,196 per square foot for it, at a moment when the market briefly supported that, and the building has never returned to it. It is the same finding I get in every tower I measure: the entry price relative to the asset has mattered more than the asset.

One caveat: 23 folios recorded a sale in the 1998–99 sell-out and have never traded since. Those owners’ outcomes are untested and appear nowhere above.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

It suits a long-horizon buyer who wants a large, well-comped oceanfront home and is not trying to time anything. No home here is under 1,590 sq ft, 213 of 242 sit on three floorplates, and the record says that anyone who held through to the last five years did well without exception. At a four-year median of $1,800,000 it is priced well below the Miami Beach towers I measure at $1,600 to $2,300 per square foot.

It suits badly anyone who needs liquidity or a current price. Seven or eight homes trade a year, 2026 has produced five so far, and the annual medians have swung 22% on nothing but which floorplate sold. If you need to know what your home is worth this quarter, this building cannot tell you.

It also suits badly a buyer relying on the county’s bedroom counts. Nine homes here are recorded as six- or seven-bedrooms at under 2,100 sq ft. Check the floor plan, not the roll.

If you are selling here, the volatility of the annual medians is your biggest practical problem, in both directions. A buyer will quote you 2024 at $849 per square foot; you will want to quote 2023 at $1,033. Neither is the level — $974 across 28 sales is — and the honest way to settle it is to price against your own floorplate, of which there are likely 59 to 81 others, rather than against any single year. If your home is 2,090 sq ft, note that 2025, when four of the year’s seven sales were this layout, was the building’s second-strongest year on the record.

Interested in selling at The Pinnacle?

Learn more about selling your condo at The Pinnacle in Sunny Isles Beach with Josh Stein.

I'M READY