Artist Townhouses Hollywood

What the county record shows today

Until August 2026 this page told readers that Artist Townhomes “broke ground in December 2022, and the project is expected to be completed in the Fall of 2024”.

On 26 August 2026 I looked the property up. The Broward County Property Appraiser records one folio at 2511 Pierce Street — 514216015240 — classified “00 — Vacant residential”. It carries a land value of $820,920 and no building value at all. The legal description is a single lot: Hollywood Little Ranches, Lot 10, Block 14. The owner of record is HOLLYTOWN LLC.

Two qualifications, because I want this to be fair. First, a property appraiser records completed improvements, so early-stage or partial construction can be under way without yet generating a building value — the absence of building value is not absolute proof that no work has occurred. Second, small projects like this rarely attract development-press coverage, so silence in the trade record means less here than it would for a tower.

But the weight of it still points one way. A project that says it broke ground in December 2022 and would finish in autumn 2024 should, by August 2026, appear on the roll as improved property and be divided into eight separately-titled homes. It is neither. It remains one undivided lot classified as vacant, with no townhouse folios and no recorded sale of any home in the scheme. If someone tells you these are built or nearly built, ask them for the certificate of occupancy and the recorded plat or declaration.

The Airbnb claim, corrected

The commercial pitch of this page was a single sentence: “Owners will have the right to Airbnb their unit, which will significantly increase the potential for generating income…” That sentence needs qualifying, and this is the fourth time in this programme of pages I have found a flat rental-permission claim on a South Florida development.

Short-term letting in Hollywood is licensed by the city, not granted by a developer. Hollywood runs a Vacation Rental License Program under Chapter 119 of its Code of Ordinances. In outline, an owner must:

• Hold a City of Hollywood vacation rental licence, applied for online, with a notarised owner certification and photographs of the interior indexed to a building sketch;
• Hold a Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation transient lodging licence;
• Be registered for local business tax with both the county and the city;
• Display both licence numbers in every advertisement for the rental;
• Identify all occupants by name in each lease, and attach a copy of Chapter 119 to it.

None of that makes short-term letting impossible — Hollywood plainly permits it under licence, and the beach market is genuinely strong. But it is a regulated activity with real obligations, not a right that comes with the deed. The rules can also change: they are set by ordinance, and ordinances are amended.

There is a second layer. Whatever the city permits, your letting rights are also governed by the recorded declaration and the association’s rules — and no declaration exists for this project, because nothing has been recorded. So there is currently no document that could grant you the right this page asserted. Before relying on short-term rental income here, get the proposed declaration, confirm the licensing position with the City of Hollywood directly, and have a Florida real estate attorney read both.

The land, and what it has cost

The clearest data on this page is the transaction history of the lot itself:

The two qualified sales are real arm’s-length prices: the lot roughly doubled between 2015 and 2017. The 2021 transaction at $1,700,000 is flagged by the county as an Excluded Sale, which means it is not treated as evidence of open-market value — so I am not going to present it as a 315% gain, even though the arithmetic would look impressive.

What the county does say is that the lot’s 2026 just value is $820,920, with an assessed value of $552,530. Zoning is RM-18, Multiple Family District.

Set the proposed economics against that. Eight townhouses at $799,000 each is a gross sellout of $6,392,000 on a lot the county currently values at $820,920. That ratio is not unusual for infill development — construction, financing, permitting and profit all sit in the gap — but it does tell you that the great majority of the value has to be created by actually building the homes. Which, on the county’s evidence, has not yet happened.

The deposit structure

This page described the terms plainly: a pre-construction price of $799,000 per unit, with a 20% deposit on signing and four further payments tied to construction milestones, the last due on issuance of the certificate of occupancy.

Twenty per cent of $799,000 is roughly $160,000, payable at signature. On a project where the county shows no construction and the stated completion date passed nearly two years ago, that is a figure to think hard about.

Florida law requires deposits on the pre-construction sale of residential condominium units to be held in escrow, subject to the terms of the purchase agreement and the statutory framework. But the protections that apply depend on how the scheme is legally structured — townhouses can be sold as condominium units, as fee-simple homes in a subdivision, or under other arrangements, and the escrow and disclosure rules are not identical across them. That is a question for a Florida real estate attorney reading your specific contract, not something to assume.

The practical instruction is simple: before paying anything, establish who holds the deposit, under what agreement, in what account, and on what conditions it is returnable. Get it in writing, and get it read by a lawyer you chose rather than one you were introduced to.

What to establish before you pay anything

• The current construction status, evidenced. Ask for the building permit number and the permit’s status with the City of Hollywood, which you can verify independently. The county record shows vacant land.
• Whether the plat or declaration has been recorded, and the book and page reference. The site is still a single undivided folio.
• How the homes will be conveyed — condominium units or fee-simple townhouses — because the deposit protections and the governing documents differ.
• Where your deposit goes, in what escrow account, under whose control, and on what terms it is returnable. Then have a Florida attorney confirm it.
• The vacation-rental position, from the City of Hollywood directly, not from a brochure — and the proposed declaration’s leasing provisions, when one exists.
• A current, dated completion schedule, and the contractual remedy if it is missed again.
• Who the developer is and what they have delivered before. The owner of record is HOLLYTOWN LLC; ask what else that principal has completed in Broward and go and look at it.

The location argument on this page is sound: Pierce Street is close to Hollywood’s arts district, minutes from the beach, I-95 and Fort Lauderdale’s airport, and small fee-simple townhouses with rental potential are a genuinely useful product in that market. The problem is not the concept, it is that the public record shows an empty lot two years after the advertised completion date. Until that changes, treat any request for a six-figure deposit with real caution, and take advice before you write a cheque.

Thinking about Artist Townhomes?

Before you part with a 20% deposit, I will check the building permit with the City of Hollywood, confirm whether any plat or declaration has been recorded, and get the vacation-rental position from the city directly. If the answers are good, you will know. If they are not, you will know that too.

ASK JOSH ABOUT THIS ONE