The Delmore, Surfside: Zaha Hadid on the Champlain Towers site, and why nothing has sold

The Delmore is the most consequential building under development in Miami-Dade, and as of April 2026 it had not signed a single contract. Thirty-seven residences by Zaha Hadid Architects, from $15 million, averaging $35–40 million, on the two-acre Surfside oceanfront where Champlain Towers South stood. A deal for more than $200 million of units came close and collapsed over funding-source concerns. What that record actually tells you is not what most coverage assumes.

The site

On 24 June 2021 Champlain Towers South collapsed at 8777 Collins Avenue. It is the deadliest building failure in modern American history, and it is the reason Florida rewrote its condominium inspection and reserve law, and part of the reason the secondary mortgage market rewrote its condominium underwriting five years later.

Damac Properties — the Dubai developer founded by Hussain Sajwani, working through Damac International — acquired the two-acre oceanfront site for $120 million in the months following the collapse, in what is the group’s first project in the United States. Site clearing began in June 2023.

Any honest page about this building has to hold two things at once. It is a development site with 200 linear feet of Surfside beachfront, which is genuinely rare and genuinely valuable. It is also the place where 98 people died. Buyers will weigh those differently, and a broker who pretends the second fact is a marketing problem rather than a real one is not worth listening to.

What is being built

Zaha Hadid Architects, of London, designed the building. Thirty-seven residences across twelve storeys — deliberately low, on a site that could have carried far more density — with units of 7,000 to 10,000 square feet, marketed as “mansions in the sky.”

The amenity programme runs to 55,000 square feet and includes a private residents’ restaurant, butler service allocated per unit, and a 75-foot swimming pool suspended 125 feet above street level. Douglas Elliman handles sales. Completion is expected in 2029.

Thirty-seven households across 55,000 square feet of amenity is an unusually generous ratio, and it is the clearest statement of what this is: not a condominium in the ordinary sense but a small number of very large houses stacked on a beach, with a hotel’s worth of service attached.

The foundation, which is the actual story

The engineering deserves more attention than it has received.

Before any vertical construction, the site is undergoing deep soil mixing — a year-long process of injecting binder into the ground to stabilise and strengthen it — ahead of excavating a two-storey basement. A year of ground treatment before a single column goes up is not standard practice on a Miami-Dade oceanfront site. It is an order of magnitude beyond it.

That is not a coincidence. The most technically conservative foundation work in South Florida is being carried out on the site of South Florida’s worst structural failure, by a developer who knows exactly how his building will be read.

There is something worth sitting with in that. Whatever else one thinks of this project, the engineering response to Surfside is being built at Surfside, and it will be the most heavily scrutinised foundation in the state. A buyer’s structural concern about this specific address is, on the evidence, the concern least justified.

Why nothing has sold

By April 2026, after a sales launch in early 2025, no contracts had been signed. A representative confirmed it directly. One transaction covering more than $200 million of units reached the contract stage and fell apart over concerns about the source of the funds.

The obvious explanation is the site’s history. It is probably not the main one. Three other factors are doing more work.

The launch preceded the project. Sales opened in early 2025 while the developer was still resubmitting master building permits and had not yet secured insurance or a general contractor. A sales gallery was targeted for February 2025. At the ultra-prime level a buyer writing a $35 million cheque is underwriting delivery risk as much as design, and an unpermitted, uninsured, uncontracted project with a 2029 completion is a hard underwriting exercise. The relaunch acknowledges this: the plan is to go back to market once permits, insurance and a contractor are in hand.

The price is not a Surfside price. An average of $35–40 million, with penthouses discussed above $150 million, prices this building against Palm Beach oceanfront estates and the very top of Miami Beach — not against Surfside, which is a quiet, low-rise residential town. Damac is not selling into an existing price band; it is attempting to create one, on a site with a difficult history, from a standing start. That is a materially harder sell than the architecture implies.

Thirty-seven units is a very small pond. A 300-unit tower needs a market. A 37-unit building needs 37 specific people on earth, each willing to spend $35 million on this address. At that level the buyer pool is countable, and one collapsed $200 million deal is not a rounding error — it is a meaningful fraction of the building.

What the zero actually means for a buyer

A project with no contracts is not automatically a bad purchase. It is a specific kind of purchase, with specific consequences.

You have negotiating leverage that will not exist later. A developer with zero contracts and a 2029 delivery has every reason to make the first several buyers comfortable — on price, on deposit structure, on unit selection, on finishes. Early buyers into a stalled ultra-prime launch have historically extracted terms that later buyers do not see.

You are carrying absorption risk. If the building does not sell through, you will own in a partially occupied building with a shared cost base designed for 37 households. Ask what happens to the amenity operating budget if half the units are unsold at delivery, and who funds the gap.

Your deposit protection is the whole conversation. With permits, insurance and a contractor still being assembled at the time of the reporting above, the escrow terms, the conditions on release of deposits, and the developer’s completion guarantees matter more here than in a conventional pre-construction purchase. This is a question for a Florida real estate lawyer before it is a question for a broker.

Resale is untested by definition. There is no comparable sale in this building and there will not be one for years. Anyone buying is setting the comparable rather than relying on one.

The questions to ask before going under contract

1. Have master building permits been issued? Not applied for. Issued. Ask for the permit numbers and check them against the public record.

2. Is a general contractor under contract, and is the project insured? Both were outstanding at the time of the April 2026 reporting. Both are prerequisites to a credible delivery date.

3. What are the escrow terms and when are deposits released to the developer? Under Florida law the answer varies with the structure of the agreement. Have a lawyer read it, not a brochure.

4. What is the completion guarantee, and what happens if 2029 slips? A site requiring a year of soil treatment before vertical construction has a longer critical path than most. Establish your remedies in writing.

5. What does the amenity budget assume about occupancy? Fifty-five thousand square feet of amenity, a restaurant and per-unit butler service across 37 households is expensive when full and punishing when half-empty.

6. What is planned regarding the memorial? The site’s history is a permanent feature of the address. Understand what is being built, what is being commemorated and where, before you buy rather than after.

7. Who is the buyer pool at $35 million in Surfside? Ask the developer directly who they believe the next thirty-six buyers are. The answer will tell you a great deal about how carefully the pricing was set.

The wider read

The Delmore is a test of a proposition rather than a building: that a globally significant architect, a very large budget and an irreplaceable beach can create an ultra-prime price band where none existed, on a site the market has strong feelings about.

It may work. The engineering is serious, the architecture is genuinely significant, and 200 feet of Surfside oceanfront is not reproducible. Damac has the balance sheet to wait, and the relaunch — going back to market with permits, insurance and a contractor secured — addresses the most legitimate objection buyers had.

But the sales record to date is a fact rather than a narrative, and it should be read plainly. As of April 2026 the market had been given more than a year to respond to one of the most distinguished residential designs ever proposed in Florida, and it had not. That is information.

For a buyer who wants this address, the honest advice is that the moment of maximum leverage is now, before the relaunch, and that the questions above are worth more than the renderings. For everyone else, this is the most instructive project in South Florida to watch, because what happens at 8777 Collins will say more about the top of this market than any index will.