W Brickell

What is actually in the building

The county returns 528 folios at 485 Brickell Avenue. 520 are homes. Of the rest, two are hotel-classified commercial units of 844 and 672 sq ft, assessed for 2026 at $406,639 and $323,770; one is a reference folio carrying no dwelling; and one is a store folio the county records with a square footage of minus one, assessed at $740,000 — plainly a data error in the roll rather than a real measurement, and flagged here rather than quietly dropped. All are excluded from every figure below.

The homes run from 424 sq ft to 1,459 sq ft, median 842, and the mix is 180 studios, 207 one-bedrooms, 132 two-bedrooms and one four-bedroom. Repeated floorplates carry most of the building: 68 homes at 842 sq ft, and 34 each at 495, 790, 876, 898 and 953. That means an exact comparable is nearly always available here, which matters more than usual in a building where the smallest home is under a third the size of the largest.

For 2026 the county assesses the homes between $185,904 and $950,894, median $458,060.

What happens when a building sells out at the bottom

Across the buildings I measure, roughly a fifth of resellers are underwater, and at several the figure is above half. At W Brickell the county records 602 resales and just 44 of them — 7.3% — sold for less than the owner paid. The median reseller is up 31.1%. That is one of the strongest ownership records I hold, and on 602 transactions it is not a small-sample effect.

The explanation is not the building. It is the calendar.

Three hundred and fifty-nine of this building’s homes recorded their first qualified sale in 2010 — the year Miami condominium prices bottomed. Everyone who bought this building new bought it at the low. And the record shows exactly what you would expect from that.

And the longer they held, the starker it gets. Of the 51 original buyers who sold in 2021 or later, not one lost money, and the median gain was 87.0%. Across all 223 resales completed since the start of 2021, the loss rate is 4.5% and the median gain 50.0%.

The single best outcome on the record is a 495 sq ft home bought for $141,340 on 26 March 2010 and sold for $502,000 on 28 December 2022 — up 255.2%. The worst is a 790 sq ft home bought for $268,748 in May 2010 and sold for $179,450 in March 2011, down 33.2%: someone who bought at the bottom and sold ten months later anyway.

I want to be precise about what this does and does not mean, because it is easy to misread a number this good. It is not evidence that W Brickell is a better building than its neighbours. It is evidence that its owners entered at a better price than its neighbours’ owners did. I have measured buildings a mile from here whose original buyers have loss rates of 50.6% and 69.0% — not because those buildings are worse, but because they sold out in 2005–08 instead of 2010. On the county record, when you bought has mattered more than what you bought, and this building is the clearest demonstration of it I have.

One caveat: 73 folios recorded a sale in the 2010–11 sell-out and have never sold again. Those owners’ outcomes are untested and appear in none of the figures above.

The price record

Across the four-year window the building cleared a median $855 per square foot in a band from $640 to $1,130, at a median price of $750,000, on 87 qualified sales.

No four-year change is published and the building carries a dash in my Miami Condo Index, because 2026 has recorded only three qualified sales and my rule requires at least five at both ends of the window. Do not read the 2026 figure of $700 as a fall. On three sales it is not a level; the honest reading of where this building trades is the $795 to $861 range that 2023 to 2025 produced across 84 sales.

The record price is $1,250,000, paid on 28 March 2022 for a 1,386 sq ft home — $902 per square foot. The highest price per square foot is $1,130, paid on 6 June 2023 for a 495 sq ft home at $559,500 — a useful illustration that in this building the smallest homes carry the highest per-foot figures, and that a per-foot comparable pulled from a studio will badly overstate a two-bedroom.

It trades at about one home in 24 a year, which is the median rate across my index — but on 520 homes that means roughly twenty sales a year, so a current comparable is always available.

Who this building suits, and who it does not

It suits a buyer who wants a small Brickell home in a building with a genuinely exceptional ownership record and enough volume that the record means something. Six hundred and two resales at a 7.3% loss rate is checkable by anyone in ten minutes on the county register.

It suits a buyer who will match the floorplate. With 68 homes at 842 sq ft and 34 each at five other sizes, there is nearly always an exact comparable — and given that per-foot prices here run from $640 to $1,130 depending mostly on size, using the right one is the difference between a good price and a bad one.

It suits badly a buyer who reads the resale record as a forecast. That 7.3% belongs to people who bought in 2010. You cannot buy at 2010 prices, and nothing in this record says a 2026 buyer will do what a 2010 buyer did. The people who bought here after 2011 have a 13.2% loss rate — still good, but four times the sell-out cohort’s.

It suits badly anyone wanting space. The median home is 842 sq ft and 387 of the 520 are studios or one-bedrooms.

If you are selling here, your position is strong and you should make the ownership record part of the pitch: 602 resales, 7.3% losses, median gain 31.1%, and zero losses among the long-held original buyers. Price from 2023 to 2025 — $840, $861 and $795 per square foot across 84 sales — and be ready for a buyer to raise the 2026 figure of $700. The answer is that it rests on three sales. What you should not do is price a two-bedroom off the $1,130 per square foot a 495 sq ft studio achieved in June 2023; that is a size effect, and a prepared buyer will say so.

Interested in selling in W Brickell?

Learn more about selling your condo in W Brickell with Josh Stein.

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