Part of the Miami penthouse guide — the full library of buildings, pricing and what a penthouse purchase actually involves.
This page used to quote three asking prices. Asking prices are opinions, and these were seven years old. What follows instead is the part you can check: for each of the three Miami Beach penthouses this page has always covered, the price the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser actually recorded — what was paid, on what date, across how many square feet.
The gap between the two is the whole point of the page. Every one of these three homes was asking materially more than the county says the top of its building has ever fetched.
| Building | Previously listed here at | Highest price on the county record | Date | $/sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mansions at Acqualina | $55,000,000 | $27,000,000 | Jun 2021 | $2,929 |
| Continuum South Beach (south tower) | $39,000,000 | $30,000,000 | Jun 2021 | $3,646 |
| 1500 Ocean Drive | $25,000,000 | $14,900,000 | Mar 2021 | $1,803 |
1500 Ocean Drive — asked $25 million, sold for $14.9 million
The penthouse this page has described for years — five bedrooms, roughly 8,400 square feet, a rooftop terrace, double wine rooms and a circular great room with water on three sides — corresponds to a home the county carries as three combined folios totalling 8,262 square feet of heated area. No single folio at 1500 Ocean Drive is anywhere near that size; the largest is 4,640 square feet. A home of that description at this address exists on the record exactly once, and the county has its entire ownership history:
- August 2000 — $5,500,000 ($666 per square foot)
- September 2007 — $12,000,000 ($1,452 per square foot)
- March 2021 — $14,900,000 ($1,803 per square foot)
So the $25,000,000 figure this page carried was an ask. The close, when it came in March 2021, was $14.9 million — a little over 40% below it. That is not a criticism of the home; it is what the top of a small oceanfront building does when a price is set on ambition rather than on comparable closings.
The building itself is 113 homes, from 480 to 4,640 square feet, with a median of 1,530. It is not a penthouse building with apartments attached — it is an apartment building with one very large home at the top. Four qualified sales closed here in 2026 at a median of $1,950,000.
Address: 1500 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Continuum South Beach — the $30 million south tower record
The south tower at 100 South Pointe Drive is the deepest luxury market of the three, and the only one where the county record shows a genuine top-of-building trophy trading repeatedly. The building’s highest recorded price is $30,000,000, paid in June 2021 for 8,229 square feet — $3,646 per square foot. That same home has an unusually complete chain behind it:
- July 2003 — $2,200,000
- August 2004 — $2,550,000
- May 2011 — $10,576,000
- December 2014 — $21,000,000
- June 2021 — $30,000,000
Read that ladder rather than any single number. The home changed hands twice in the first five years for close to construction pricing, then multiplied roughly twelve-fold over the seventeen years that followed. The 2014-to-2021 leg alone is +42.9%.
The $39,000,000 this page previously quoted has no counterpart on the record. It sits $9 million above the highest price the county has ever registered at this address.
One more sale belongs next to that record: $23,900,000 in December 2025 for 4,776 square feet — $5,004 per square foot. Set the two side by side. The building’s biggest headline price was paid in 2021 at $3,646 a foot; a home little more than half the size sold four years later at 37% more per square foot. At the top of a building the largest number and the strongest number are rarely the same sale, and the rate is the one that tells you where the market is now. Continuum’s south tower runs to 294 homes between 1,201 and 10,750 square feet. It closed 18 qualified sales in 2024 at a median of $6,350,000, 14 in 2025 at $5,575,000, and 9 through this point in 2026 at $5,000,000.
Address: 100 South Pointe Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Mansions at Acqualina — where the $55 million number came from, and what the record says
This is the largest gap on the page. The home described here — a two-storey duplex, six bedrooms, staff quarters, Fendi Casa throughout — was presented at $55,000,000 and at 15,000 square feet.
Two corrections, and the second matters more than the first. The highest price the county records at 17749 Collins Avenue is $27,000,000, paid on 30 June 2021 across two combined folios totalling 9,218 square feet — $2,929 per square foot. Nothing at this address approaches $55 million on the record.
On size: the county measures heated area, which excludes terraces, staff quarters and garage. The largest heated area on record at Mansions at Acqualina is 9,218 square feet — two folios in the building carry that figure on their own. A 15,000-square-foot claim is therefore counting a great deal of space the county does not count. Both numbers can be honest; only one of them is checkable, and it is the smaller one.
The pattern here is worth noting: the building’s five largest recorded sales are all two-folio combinations totalling 9,218 square feet, ranging from $16,500,000 to $27,000,000. Buying two units and joining them is not the exception at this address. It is how the big homes here were made.
Mansions at Acqualina is 84 homes, 4,609 to 9,218 square feet, median 4,609 — the highest median of any building on this page by a wide margin. It closed 5 qualified sales in 2024 at a median of $6,900,000 and 4 in 2025 at $6,862,500. The most recent, in April 2026, was $13,300,000 for 4,609 square feet — $2,886 per square foot, the highest per-foot price the building has ever recorded on a single folio. The largest single-folio price is still $16,000,000, paid back in April 2016 for one of those 9,218-square-foot homes — but at $1,736 a foot. Ten years on, buyers are paying two thirds more per foot for half the house.
Address: 17749 Collins Avenue, Sunny Isles Beach, FL 33160
What the three have in common
All three asks on this page were set before 2020. All three buildings then recorded their highest-ever prices in 2021 — March, June and June. And all three of those record closings came in below the asks this page was publishing.
That is the useful lesson for anyone shopping at this level on Miami Beach. At the very top of a building there are no comparable sales, because there is usually only one home of that size in it. The asking price is therefore a position, not a valuation. The county record is the only number in the transaction that has already survived a buyer, a lender and a closing.
Two of the three — 1500 Ocean Drive and Mansions at Acqualina — also show something a listing sheet will not: their record homes are combinations, assembled from separate folios. If you are looking for 8,000-plus square feet on the beach, you are usually looking at a home somebody built by buying twice.
How these figures were produced. Every folio at each building’s street address was retrieved individually from the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser on 20 August 2026 (1500 Ocean Drive on 18 August 2026), filtered to residential condominium folios, and restricted to sales the county itself flags as qualified — its designation for a genuine open-market transaction between unrelated parties. Foreclosures, deeds in lieu and nominal transfers are excluded even where they carry a price. Where one transaction spans more than one folio it is priced against the combined area and labelled as such; bulk and portfolio transfers are not treated as apartment sales. Square footage is the county’s heated area and excludes terraces. You can check any figure yourself at the county’s property search.
For the buildings themselves, floor by floor, start with the Miami penthouse guide. For the market-wide records — where the top of the Miami market begins — see the most expensive homes in Miami, and the most expensive apartments in Miami for the same county-record treatment across ten buildings.
Josh Stein is an expert in Miami Beach penthouses
Josh Stein is a Miami real estate sales associate, Florida license SL3057661, selling Miami luxury property since 2002 with more than $1 billion closed. For a straight read on any building on this page — including when the answer is that you should not buy it — contact Josh directly at +1 (305) 695-8257 or email him at hello@joshsteinrealtor.com.