The Avenue Coral Gables

The hotel is the point

This page has described The Avenue as a Coral Gables condominium. It is The Avenue Hotel & Residences, and the distinction is the reason to be interested in it.

A buyer here has three options with their home: live in it full time; let it on a conventional annual lease; or place it into the hotel’s programme and have it operated as a hotel room, earning short-stay income through the building’s hotel operator. That third option is unusual anywhere. In Coral Gables it is close to remarkable.

Coral Gables is one of the most tightly regulated municipalities in Miami-Dade, and short-term rental in its residential districts is heavily restricted. A resident cannot generally buy a Gables condominium and let it by the night. A licensed hotel with condominium residences attached is one of the few structures through which short-stay income becomes legally available in the city — the income flows through the hotel operation rather than around the rules.

That makes this building a genuinely different product from the rest of Coral Gables’ new stock, and it explains the size mix. Homes of 598 to 1,200 square feet, one and two bedrooms, delivered fully furnished — those are not family apartments, they are units designed to work as hotel keys when the owner is away.

Three cautions, and they matter. First, the terms of a hotel-rental programme are where the economics live: the operator’s split, whether participation is optional, minimum commitments, blackout periods and who controls rates. None of that is in any marketing material and all of it should be in writing before you buy. Second, income from a hotel programme is not guaranteed and is not a lease — it varies with occupancy. Third, a home operating as a hotel room carries more wear, more turnover and, generally, higher association and operating costs than a conventional condominium. Ask for the projected budget on that basis, not on a residential one.

What this page had wrong

The specification box at the top of this page gives 9 storeys and 54 units. At the groundbreaking on 1 November 2023, the developer and the architect described an eight-storey building with 48 residences, and Florida YIMBY reported it that way.

I have not been able to reconcile the two. Some listing sources do quote 54 fully furnished units, so it is possible the count changed during design, or that the higher figure includes something the 48 does not — the six ground-floor retail condominiums, for instance, are separate units in their own right. Rather than pick a number, I am telling you both and telling you which is better sourced: 48, from the developer and architect at the groundbreaking. If you are buying, take the count from the current offering documents and nowhere else.

The rest of the specification is consistent across sources and worth stating plainly. Residences run 598 to 1,200 square feet in one- and two-bedroom layouts, fully furnished, with Italian kitchens and baths and Miele, Sub-Zero or Wolf appliances. Prices ran from $730,000 to over $1.3 million. There is a resort-style pool deck with a summer kitchen and dining area at the top of the building, valet parking, and hotel front-desk service. On the ground floor there is about 3,800 square feet of retail in six condominium units, all of which have been sold.

The design is Parisian-inspired neo-classical — a deliberate fit with the Mediterranean-revival vocabulary Coral Gables enforces on new building, and a long way from the glass towers going up elsewhere in the county.

Where construction actually stands

The verifiable sequence is short:

• July 2023 — reported 65% sold.
• 1 November 2023 — groundbreaking, with more than 75% sold. Completion was then expected in early 2025.
• April 2024 — foundation poured.
• Since then — no topping-off report, no completion report, no certificate-of-occupancy report that I can find in the development trade press.

Current marketing describes the building as available for 2026. As of 26 August 2026 I have found nothing confirming that it has been delivered.

I am not suggesting anything is wrong. This is a small building by a local developer that sold out early and therefore has little reason to keep issuing press releases — quiet is the normal state for a project like this, and the trade outlets simply stop covering an eight-storey building once the foundation is in. But a delivery date that has moved from early 2025 into 2026 without public confirmation is a fact a buyer should hold, and the remedy is documentary rather than journalistic: ask for the certificate of occupancy, or for the current construction schedule from the general contractor.

No county record for the site

On 26 August 2026 I searched the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser for 351 San Lorenzo Avenue in every address format the index accepts. It returns nothing. I then swept every street number from 300 to 415 on San Lorenzo Avenue; only two parcels came back, both large Merrick Plat holdings of roughly 69,893 square feet associated with the Merrick Park complex opposite — not this site, which has been described as an 11,000 square foot lot.

So there is no folio, no assessed value, no recorded sale and no comparable available for The Avenue. That is unsurprising for a building still under construction whose condominium declaration has not been recorded, but it has a practical consequence: every price attached to this building is a developer or listing figure, and none of it can be checked against the public record. When the building completes and the declaration records, real numbers will go on this page.

It also means the ordinary trick of looking up what a neighbour paid is unavailable. If you want price context in Coral Gables today, it has to come from recorded sales in comparable finished buildings, which I can pull for you.

What to establish before you buy here

• The hotel-programme agreement, in full. The operator’s revenue split, whether participation is optional or required, minimum nights committed, who sets rates, blackout periods, and how and when you get paid. This is the document that determines whether the building’s main selling point is worth anything to you.
• The certificate of occupancy, or the contractor’s current schedule. The target has moved from early 2025 to 2026 without public confirmation.
• The residence count and your unit’s exact size, from the offering documents — 48 and 54 are both in circulation.
• The association budget calculated on hotel-style operation, not residential. Turnover, housekeeping, front-desk staffing and wear all cost money, and early estimates on hotel-condominiums are frequently revised upward after turnover.
• What is included in “fully furnished”, and who replaces it when hotel use wears it out.
• The Coral Gables position in writing. If short-stay income is why you are buying, have a Florida attorney confirm how the hotel licence and the city’s rules apply to your specific residence — not to the building in general.

The Avenue is a well-conceived small building in a genuinely excellent Coral Gables location, doing something the rest of the city cannot easily do. It sold out early, which suggests buyers saw that. The work for a buyer now is entirely in the paperwork: the hotel agreement, the current schedule and the real unit count — none of which is answerable from a website, including this one.

Thinking about The Avenue Coral Gables?

The hotel-rental programme is the reason to buy here and the terms of it are not published anywhere. I will get you the agreement, the current construction schedule and the real residence count before you commit — and tell you honestly what the income is likely to look like.

ASK JOSH ABOUT THE AVENUE