Trump Palace

What is actually in the building

The county returns 274 folios at 18101 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. That is rare — most towers I measure carry ten to forty non-residential folios — and it means nothing has to be filtered out of the figures below, which makes this record cleaner than most.

The homes run from 1,149 sq ft to 6,510 sq ft, median 1,873, and the mix is heavily weighted to larger homes: 16 one-bedrooms, 95 two-bedrooms, 157 three-bedrooms, four four-bedrooms, one five-bedroom and one six-bedroom. More than half this building is a three-bedroom, which is unusual on the Sunny Isles oceanfront and is the single most useful thing to know about it.

Six floorplates carry most of the tower: 64 homes at 2,143 sq ft, 36 at 1,873, 35 at 1,909, 32 each at 1,276 and 1,348, and 30 at 1,389. 273 of the 274 measure 5,330 sq ft or below; a single 6,510 sq ft home sits above a 1,180 sq ft gap and should be read on its own.

For 2026 the county assesses the homes between $424,575 and $3,840,750, median $1,421,770.

The price record

Across four years that is 36 qualified sales, a median of $1,016 per square foot in a band from $634 to $1,381, and a median price of $1,560,000.

I am not publishing a four-year change here, and the 2026 row is the reason. Three qualified sales, at a median price of $2,848,800 and $1,329 per square foot — figures well above every other year in the table. Read literally they say the building jumped 32.8% in a year. I do not believe that, and neither should you. The median home sold in 2026 measured 2,143 sq ft against 1,389 in 2023: three large homes happened to trade, and in a building running from 1,149 to 6,510 sq ft that is more than enough to move a three-item median by a third. The building carries a dash in my Miami Condo Index until the sample supports better.

The defensible reading is the 2023–25 band: roughly $1,000 per square foot, on 33 sales, with no clear direction. $1,001, then $1,075, then $992. That is a flat market, and flat is a perfectly respectable answer.

Turnover runs at one home in 30 per year against a median of one in 24 across the buildings in my Miami Condo Index — slower than the market, roughly nine of these 274 homes a year.

The building that broke my rule about 2006

Across the buildings I measure, the strongest single predictor of whether an owner made money has been the year they bought. Towers that sold out in 2005–08 have produced original-buyer loss rates of 45%, 50%, and in one Edgewater case 69.0%. Towers that sold out in 2010–12 have produced rates as low as 3.3%. It has been the most reliable pattern in the county record.

255 qualified sales closed in this building in 2006 — the top of the cycle. And its original buyers are fine.

A 23.8% loss rate for a peak-vintage cohort is roughly a third of what the worst 2008 building produced, and the median 2006 buyer here is up 24.7%. And the ones who waited did better still: of the twelve original 2006 buyers who held until 2021 or later, not one sold at a loss, at a median gain of 55.7%. Across all 70 resales completed since the start of 2021, the loss rate is 4.3% and the median gain 36.9%.

I want to be careful about what this does and does not prove. It does not overturn the pattern — the 2006 cohort here still lost money more often than the buyers who came after them, which is the pattern pointing the same way, just gently. What it shows is that vintage alone is not destiny: a peak-year buyer of a large oceanfront three-bedroom has fared very differently from a peak-year buyer of a small inland studio, even though both bought at the top. The entry price relative to the asset mattered more than the calendar date. This is the clearest counter-example I have found, and I would rather publish it than quietly leave it out of a thesis I have argued elsewhere on this site.

The two extremes are both 2,431 sq ft homes, which makes them unusually comparable. The best is one bought for $830,000 on 1 August 2006 and sold for $2,800,000 on 24 February 2015 — up 237.3%. The worst is one bought for $1,250,000 on 20 January 2009 and sold for $600,000 on 10 October 2011, down 52.0%. Same floorplate; the first owner got in at $341 per square foot and the second at $514.

Two chains worth seeing in full. Unit 5509, 4,141 sq ft, sold for exactly $5,000,000 on 1 June 2007 and exactly $5,000,000 on 30 August 2013 — six years and a financial crisis for precisely nothing — then $3,785,000 on 2 May 2019, down 24.3% from where it started. And unit 5409, 4,539 sq ft: $2,300,000 in December 2006, $3,600,000 in August 2008, then $3,650,000 in September 2020 — twelve years for a 1.4% gain. At the very top of this building, the large-home market has gone almost nowhere in twenty years. The building’s good aggregate record is being made in its two- and three-bedrooms, not its penthouses.

One caveat: 61 folios recorded a sale in 2006 and have never traded since. Those outcomes are untested and appear nowhere above.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

It suits a buyer who wants a large oceanfront home and cares about what happened to the last people who did the same thing. 157 of the 274 homes are three-bedrooms, the median home is 1,873 sq ft, and this is one of the few peak-vintage buildings whose original owners came out ahead. At roughly $1,000 per square foot it is priced well below the Miami Beach towers I measure at $1,600 to $2,300.

It suits badly a buyer at the top of the building expecting the largest homes to lead. They have not. Unit 5509 is worth less than it was in 2007 and unit 5409 gained 1.4% over twelve years. If you are buying above 4,000 sq ft here, buy it to live in.

It also suits badly anyone who needs the market read precisely right now. 2025 recorded six sales and 2026 has recorded three — the current level is genuinely uncertain, and the 2026 median of $1,329 per square foot is an artefact of three large homes rather than a repricing.

If you are selling here, price to the 2023–25 band of around $1,000 per square foot and expect to be shown the 2026 figures. Those three sales will be quoted at you as evidence the building has jumped a third; they are not, and the fact that the median home sold in 2026 was 754 sq ft larger than in 2023 is the answer. Use your own floorplate — 64 homes share the 2,143 sq ft layout and 36 share the 1,873 — and if you bought in the 2006 sell-out, check your actual entry price before assuming you are underwater. On this record, three in four of your neighbours were not.

Interested in selling at Trump Palace?

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