The Miami Confidential

By Josh Stein — Miami real estate sales associate, Florida license SL3057661. Selling Miami luxury property since 2002, with more than $1 billion closed.

Josh SteinFlorida license SL3057661

What this is

Why this page exists

Most Miami real estate coverage is a press release with a photograph attached. A tower gets announced, a rendering circulates, and eighteen months later nobody mentions that it never got financed.

The Miami Confidential is the other half of the story. When a project stalls, when a lender forecloses, when an association sues its developer, when a delivery date quietly moves for the fourth time — it goes here, dated and sourced.

Nothing on this page is selling you anything. There is no commission attached to a foreclosure filing or a delivery date that moved. The job is to put the most accurate and current picture of this market in front of you — including the parts the brochure leaves out — so that you can make your own decision.

It is not sugarcoated. Where the record is ugly, it gets printed. Where a project did everything right and still delivered five years late, that gets printed too. Where something is not published anywhere, this page says MISSING rather than guessing.

An item runs here only if it clears two bars: something changed, and it changes what a buyer or seller would actually do. Lifestyle, neighbourhood guides and building features live in the blog.

Nobody Will Insure the $1.6 Billion Surfside Tower

The Delmore — 37 residences on the site where 98 people died in 2021 — has reportedly been halted since February 2026 over construction insurance. That report originates with The Wall Street Journal in June 2026. I have not read it. What I have read is Insurance Business relaying it — and that outlet does not independently confirm the halt, and does not name the Journal article it is relaying. Treat the halt as reported, not established. JSR has not verified it.

The reason given is not the site. In the same relayed report, the impasse is attributed to two things about DAMAC: the Dubai-based developer’s lack of South Florida development experience, and the absence of a local development partner — the relationships that open doors with domestic carriers and Lloyd’s syndicates. But that reason comes from unnamed insurance brokers, described only as familiar with the matter, in an article this page has not read. Anonymous sources at second hand are not a record. This page reports that the claim was made; it does not adopt it. In the same month, a deal covering more than $200 million in contracts collapsed.

“We should have spent a bit more time on due diligence, on community reaction, rather than on the physical property itself.”

Jeffery Rossely, SVP of Development, DAMAC International — to NPR, 21 June 2026. He was speaking about community opposition in Surfside, not about the insurance question.

“It’s still a very challenging market.”

Shanna Sweeney, SVP Excess Casualty, Upland Specialty — on placing construction cover

Swipe →

Open the full Delmore file →

Developer response — DAMAC has answered publicly. A DAMAC spokesperson said the project “continues to move forward” while it finalises construction insurance, a master building permit and an operations partner, and that completion “remains on track for 2029” — reporting carried by Yahoo Finance, 24 June 2026. The developer has separately said it intends to relaunch late in 2026, contingent on a joint-venture partner and resolving the cover (The Real Deal, 15 April 2026). Both are republished from the public record. JSR did not seek comment.

Sources: Insurance Business · The Real Deal, 15 April 2026 · NPR, 21 June 2026 (carried by WLRN) · Full file: The Delmore. Re-checked 7 September 2026: the halt is still only reported, and JSR still has not independently established it. Trade coverage through July 2026 continues to describe the project as stopped at pre-sale over construction insurance. Nothing found that contradicts this file.

$53,621 a Day, and the Cranes Have Stopped

Mercedes-Benz Places Miami — JDS Development’s two-tower, 791-unit project with a 174-key hotel — is in foreclosure and construction has stopped.

An $86 million acquisition and construction loan from Maxim Capital Group matured on 15 January 2025 and was not repaid. On 24 March 2026 a Cottonwood Group affiliate took the loan over and in April 2026 filed to foreclose. Subcontractors have filed liens. The City of Miami served a default notice over an $8 million firehouse obligation. Roughly 10 percent of buyers requested rescission.

Swipe →

Open the full Mercedes-Benz Places file →

Developer response — JDS has answered on the record, by filing. A JDS affiliate sued Cottonwood Group, alleging it breached a confidentiality agreement by “feigning interest” in refinancing to obtain confidential information about the project and then use it to foreclose — Bisnow, 12 May 2026. The same report records that Michael Stern declined to comment. Republished from the public record. JSR did not seek comment.

Sources: Bisnow, 6 April 2026 · The Real Deal, 11 June 2026 · Full file: Mercedes-Benz Places. Re-checked 7 September 2026: JDS was still contesting the Cottonwood foreclosure, alongside subcontractor claims, as of August 2026. The lender’s complaint seeks roughly $100 million in total — about $80.4 million of principal plus interest — against the $86 million loan described above. Status unchanged.

76 Alleged Defects, and Still No Final Certificate of Occupancy

Missoni Baia, 700 NE 26th Terrace, Edgewater. Developer renderings. Open the building file →

On 30 January 2026 the Missoni Baia condominium association filed suit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court alleging 76 construction and design defects — water intrusion, cracks in structural elements, defective fire-safety systems, elevator malfunctions and lobby finishes missing against the promotional materials.

The defendants are OKO Group, Asymptote Architecture, Revuelta Architecture International, general contractor Civic Construction and 19 subcontractors. Co-developer Cain International is not named. The building received a temporary certificate of occupancy in 2023 and was handed to the association in 2024 with defects unresolved.

Open the full Missoni Baia file →

Developer response — OKO Group has made no public statement on the association’s 76-defect claim as of 10 September 2026. JSR did not seek comment. OKO has given its own account of the building’s construction problems in a separate action: suing its insurers, it asserts the tower “settled unevenly in 2021, causing direct damage to the property during construction” and that the settling delayed the temporary certificate of occupancy by at least 16 months — Bisnow, 8 April 2026. That is OKO’s account of the cause, not a response to the association’s pleading.

Sources: The Real Deal, 12 February 2026 · 7 April 2026 · Full file: Missoni Baia. Re-checked 7 September 2026: the defect suit is still live and nothing newer than the 7 April 2026 filing was found. The address in this file was corrected from 777 to 700 NE 26th Terrace on 7 September 2026 — the Miami-Dade roll records the building at 700 NE 26 TER, subdivision “700 Edgewater Condo”, 248 folios.

Ten Owners Refused to Sell. Three Years Later the Developer Paid Them $50 Million.

The EDITION Residences Miami, Edgewater. Developer renderings. Open the building file →

Two Roads Development needed to terminate the existing Biscayne 21 condominium to build its 55-storey tower. To do it, the declaration had been amended to lower the termination threshold from 100 percent of owners to 80 percent.

In July 2025 a Florida appeals court sided with the holdout owners, ruling the amendment unlawfully altered unit owners’ voting rights. In October 2025 the Florida Supreme Court declined a rehearing. The decision was reported to carry implications for condominium buyouts statewide. On 14 May 2026 three buyers sued seeking roughly $2.5 million in deposits back.

Then the ruling acquired a price. In January 2026 a Miami-Dade Circuit Court judge ordered Two Roads to restore the building to its May 2023 condition — the state it was in before the developer began stripping it. A report commissioned by the project’s lender, Bank OZK, put the cost of that restoration at $65 million. The developer now had to choose between rebuilding a condominium it intended to demolish and paying the ten owners who would not leave.

On 31 August 2026 it paid. Two Roads settled with all ten holdout owners for approximately $50 million — an average of about $5 million per unit, in a building where it had bought the majority of 192 units for $150 million in 2022. Demolition of the 13-storey structure was expected within weeks. The buyout the court broke was completed by cheque.

Open the full EDITION Residences file →

Developer response — Two Roads has answered on the record. Taylor Collins, co-founder and managing principal, said the outcome “reflects the strength of our platform”, called the case “a long and arduous process”, and said the firm would now “turn our full attention” to the site — Bisnow, 1 September 2026 and Florida YIMBY, 2 September 2026. Republished from the public record. JSR did not seek comment.

Sources: Bisnow, 1 September 2026 (settlement, the January 2026 restoration order, the $65M Bank OZK-commissioned restoration estimate) · Commercial Observer, September 2026 (ten owners, 40% pre-sold, demolition timing) · Florida YIMBY, September 2026 · The Real Deal, 10 July 2025 · 16 October 2025 · 14 May 2026 · 31 August 2026 · Full file: EDITION Residences. The Real Deal is inaccessible to our tooling; its reports here are corroborated by Bisnow, Commercial Observer and Florida YIMBY, each read directly. Reviewed 6 September 2026.

Everything Went Right at Una Residences. It Still Delivered Five Years Late.

This one has no villain, which is why it is the most useful file on the page.

Una Residences received its temporary certificate of occupancy on 26 February 2026. The first public completion expectation, reported April 2020, was 2021. In between: a $128.3 million construction loan closed in April 2021 and the date moved to 2023. The tower topped off in April 2024 and the date moved to early 2025. Three documented slips.

Through all of it the sponsor was well capitalised, the loan closed, construction never stopped, and the building sold more than 90 percent before completion — two tri-level penthouses trading at $17.75 million each.

Open the full Una Residences file →

Developer response — OKO Group and Cain International marked the delivery publicly. In a joint statement, Vladislav Doronin, chairman and chief executive of OKO Group, and Jonathan Goldstein, chief executive of Cain, said the stage “reflects years of intention behind every element of the building” — Cain International, 27 February 2026. Neither developer has made a public statement about the five-year gap between the first reported completion expectation and delivery, as of 10 September 2026. JSR did not seek comment.

Sources: Florida YIMBY, February 2026 · The Real Deal, 20 April 2021 · Full file: Una Residences

Two Years After the Ribbon Cutting: Two Lawsuits, Eighteen Counts, Eighteen Defendants

Aston Martin Residences, 300 Biscayne Boulevard Way. Developer renderings. Open the building file →

Aston Martin Residences was the trophy. 66 storeys, 391 residences, 817 feet, a sail-shaped tower at the mouth of the Miami River, a sellout expected to clear $1 billion. It cut the ribbon on 30 April 2024, roughly four years after the completion date originally expected, with one unit of 391 unsold — a 27,000 square foot triplex penthouse asking $59 million.

The association was turned over to unit owners in March 2025 — eleven months after the ribbon was cut. Within a year of getting control, it had sued twice.

A correction, made here rather than quietly: this file previously said the association took control in March 2024. That cannot be right — it is a month before the building’s own opening. Bisnow, reporting on 3 February 2026, says the association “was turned over to unit owners in March” without printing the year; March 2025 is the only March consistent with a 30 April 2024 opening and a February 2026 report. The corrected date makes the sequence tighter, not looser.

Sources: The Real Deal, 3 February 2026 · Bisnow, 3 February 2026 · Bisnow, 21 April 2026 · The Real Deal, 27 April 2026 · The Real Deal, 30 April 2024 · Complaint, Filing #240709382, 11th Judicial Circuit · Declaration of Condominium recorded at Miami-Dade Official Records Book 34141, Page 634, read from the Property Appraiser’s legal description on master folio 01-4206-071-0001 and confirmed on unit folios 01-4206-071-2910 and 01-4206-071-3350, 5 September 2026.

The Car Elevator Tower Everyone Talks About. Here Is What Is Actually on the Record.

Porsche Design Tower at 18555 Collins Avenue is the building with the “Dezervator” — the elevator that takes your car to your apartment. It delivered in 2017. Dezer Development paid off its $214 million Wells Fargo construction loan, and a document presented at a 2020 trial put the profit at $344.9 million.

By the standards of this section, that is a success. So this file is mostly about what is not on the record — because the gap between what circulates about this building and what a tier-one outlet has actually reported is unusually wide.

Sources: The Real Deal, 10 October 2016 · Bisnow, 15 December 2016 · The Real Deal, 9 July 2018 · The Real Deal, 20 November 2018 · The Real Deal, 30 April 2019 · Bisnow, 1 July 2020

The Tower With the Most Famous Name in Brickell and No Reported Vertical Construction

Swipe →

888 Brickell by Dolce&Gabbana is one of the most heavily marketed addresses in the city. It is also, on the public record, one of the least documented.

Two things are worth a buyer’s attention here, and neither is a secret — they are simply things nobody assembles in one place.

First, the developer’s own materials do not agree on how tall the building is. One page publishes 81 storeys; another publishes 90. That is not a rounding difference. It is the kind of discrepancy that tells you the design was still moving after buyers began contracting.

Second, financing had still not closed as of 8 July 2026. A tower without a closed construction loan is a tower that cannot commit to a delivery date, no matter what date appears in the sales gallery.

Open the full 888 Brickell file →

Developer response — JDS Development has made no public statement about 888 Brickell’s construction financing or the start of vertical construction as of 10 September 2026, and no statement from JDS or Dolce & Gabbana about the project was found in any outlet after the 2023 partnership announcement. JSR did not seek comment. The Real Deal reported on 8 July 2026 that JDS was in the process of securing new debt for the project — that is reporting, not a statement by the developer.

Sources: Full dated sourcing, including the developer’s conflicting storey counts and the July 2026 financing status, is set out on the 888 Brickell building file · Pattern data: Miami Pre-Construction Delivery Tracker

Three Bidders, Two Identical $160 Million Offers, and a Building That Still Will Not Sell

The Mutiny Condominium, 2951 South Bayshore Drive in Coconut Grove — 170 units in a twelve-storey building approaching sixty years old — has now been the target of three separate buyout attempts in under two years, and not one of them has closed.

The most recent expired on a Sunday in late August 2026. BH Group, the Aventura developer, had written to unit owners in January 2026 setting out a $160 million bulk offer for the whole building. Florida law requires the approval of 80 percent of owners to carry a sale of this kind. BH Group did not reach it before its own deadline lapsed.

A note on that date: Coconut Grove Spotlight reported the expiry on Thursday 27 August 2026 and wrote that the offer ran out “Sunday.” It did not print the date. The Sunday immediately before publication was 23 August 2026. That is an inference from the publication date, not a figure the report states.

The sequence, as reported:

• December 2024 — DaGrosa Capital, of Miami.
• Early 2025 — Slate Property Group, of New York, at $160 million.
• January 2026 — BH Group, of Aventura, at $160 million. Expired late August 2026.

Two different bidders, a year apart, arrived at the same number. That is the part of this file worth sitting with. And the building’s own association says the figure did not come from any conversation with them.

“We have no idea where they got that number from. It was never ever talked about.”

Mayra Gomez, president of the Mutiny condominium association

The offer is not being withdrawn so much as parked. BH Group’s sales agent says the developer is “sitting on the sidelines” and would revive the deal only if owners came back to it.

“Until then, it’s completely up to the owners to decide if it’s a good deal for them or not.”

Greg Greer, sales agent for BH Group

“Another developer will have to know that they need to make an offer a good bit higher.”

Sabrina Wilkinson, a real estate broker who owns in the building

The Mutiny is an unusual asset to price. It ran as a hotel and club through the 1970s and 1980s and became notorious for it, closed in the early 1990s, and reopened as a condo-hotel in 1998. Some units still trade through a hotel programme managed by Provident Resorts; others are held as ordinary condominiums. Unit sizes run from under 600 square feet to a 3,300-square-foot penthouse. A single blended per-unit number has to cover all of that.

Sources: Coconut Grove Spotlight, 27 August 2026 (the expiry, the 80% threshold, and the Gomez, Greer and Wilkinson quotes) · Coconut Grove Spotlight, 12 January 2026 (unit count, address, building history, and the DaGrosa and Slate attempts) · Coconut Grove Spotlight, 26 January 2026. The Real Deal also reported the BH Group offer on 21 January 2026; that article is behind a paywall this page could not read, and nothing here relies on it. Re-checked 7 September 2026: the BH Group bid remains expired and no fourth attempt has been reported. Status unchanged.

South Florida Has Two Housing Markets. Houses Have 4.8 Months of Supply. Condos Have 12.

Across Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach, single-family houses are in a seller’s market and condominiums are not. This is not a forecast and it is not an opinion. It is in the July 2026 county statistics published by MIAMI REALTORS on 17 August 2026, and it runs the same direction in all three counties.

All figures: MIAMI REALTORS, July 2026 data, published 17 August 2026. The “seller’s / buyer’s / balanced” labels are their wording, not mine.

1. Every county is two markets, and they point opposite ways. Single-family is a seller’s market in all three. Condos are a buyer’s market in two of them and balanced in the third. Anyone reading a “South Florida is hot” headline is reading the house market.

2. Rank the counties by condo supply and the price direction falls into line exactly. Miami-Dade at 12.0 months is down 1.48%. Broward at 10.0 months is down 3.77%. Palm Beach at 6.7 months is up 3.99% — and it is the only one of the three not in buyer’s-market territory. That is three data points in a single month. It is a fact about July 2026, not a law of the market, and it is stated here as the former.

3. Broward is the one to watch. It is the only county in the tri-county area where condo sales actually fell (−2.77%), and it carries the steepest condo price decline (−3.77%). One caveat that cuts against overstating it: on time-to-contract, Broward is not the worst. Condos there went from 71 days to 86. In Miami-Dade they went from 65 days to 86 — a larger deterioration. Palm Beach barely moved, 70 to 69.

4. Active listings fell by double digits in all three counties — 15.1%, 18.9% and 21.1%. Condo inventory specifically fell 11.79% in Miami-Dade, 15.79% in Broward and 19.26% in Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade’s condo inventory has now declined for six consecutive months. This cuts against the widely repeated line that South Florida condo oversupply keeps growing. Both things are true at once: supply is high against a normal market and it is falling year over year. A file that prints only one of those is incomplete.

5. Roughly half of every existing condo sold in South Florida is bought for cash. 47.5% in Miami-Dade, 49.9% in Broward, 57.2% in Palm Beach. That matters more than it sounds. A buyer who does not need a mortgage is insulated from rate moves — and from a building being disqualified from conventional financing. As lender review of Florida condominiums tightens, the buildings that fall out of eligibility do not become unsellable; they become cash-only, which is a narrower and more price-sensitive market. Palm Beach is closest to being able to absorb that. Miami-Dade and Broward are further from it.

Sources: MIAMI REALTORS — Miami-Dade, July 2026 · Broward, July 2026 · Palm Beach County, July 2026, all published 17 August 2026. Every figure above was read from those three releases directly. This file is refreshed in place when the next month is published — it is not a snapshot of one month left to go stale.

Florida’s Own Auditors Checked the Condo Inspection Data. Reporting Got Worse, Not Better.

The milestone inspection is the most useful structural disclosure Florida has ever required of an older condominium. It is also the thing a buyer is most likely to be told “has been done” without ever seeing.

In July 2026 the Florida Legislature’s own nonpartisan research office, OPPAGA, published Report 26-04, Milestone Inspection Reporting Data 2024 and 2025 — 24 pages, public, free. It is an audit of whether the reporting behind that system actually works. It found that it is incomplete, that it is inconsistent, and that it moved backwards between 2024 and 2025.

DBPR received 2024 reporting data from 71 percent of local enforcement agency jurisdictions (277), and 2025 data from 64 percent (250). Compliance did not improve as the programme bedded in. It fell.

In the three counties this page covers, the county-level building officials all reported. A meaningful share of the municipal ones did not:

• Palm Beach County — 44% of municipal building officials did not report 2025 data (17 of 39).
• Broward County — 23% did not report (7 of 31).
• Miami-Dade County — 21% did not report (7 of 34).

The department collecting this cannot fully police it. OPPAGA states plainly:

“DBPR is unable to verify submissions to ensure that the correct official is reporting for each jurisdiction because the department does not have a comprehensive list of local enforcement agencies and the corresponding jurisdiction.”

OPPAGA Report 26-04, July 2026

The word “unsafe” is not defined

Milestone inspections identified 30 buildings in 2024 and 24 buildings in 2025 as unsafe or uninhabitable, across eight counties. But the statute that requires officials to produce that list does not define either word. OPPAGA found building officials “using multiple approaches to identify unsafe or uninhabitable buildings.” Two buildings in the same condition, in two different cities, can land on opposite sides of that line.

And being on the list does not mean anyone left. OPPAGA reports that most buildings determined unsafe or uninhabitable were not vacated. It contacted four building officials about the 2025 cases; three responded, covering five buildings, and said none of them had been vacated.

One number that looks alarming and should not be read that way

For 2025, Miami-Dade reported 308 buildings requiring a phase two inspection and Broward reported 155, while most Florida counties reported fewer than 30. That gap is not what it appears. Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach all accept a single inspection combining the phase one and phase two requirements, and DBPR directed combined-phase jurisdictions to report required phase two inspections only where a building needed repairs. The counting rule is different here, so these counts are not comparable with other counties’ counts. Reported as a fact about methodology, not as evidence that South Florida buildings are failing at ten times the state rate — which is what that pair of numbers would say if you printed it without this paragraph.

Sources: OPPAGA Report 26-04, Milestone Inspection Reporting Data 2024 and 2025, July 2026 — full PDF. Every figure and quotation above was read directly out of that report on 5 September 2026. Statutory basis: s. 553.899, Florida Statutes. Contemporaneous coverage: WLRN / News Service of Florida, 31 July 2026 · Insurance Journal, 6 August 2026.

Seven Waterfront Buildings Were Just Frozen Out of Redevelopment. The Owners Are the Ones Objecting.

On Monday 20 July 2026, the West Palm Beach City Commission unanimously adopted Ordinance No. 5177-26 on second reading — a six-month “zoning in progress” that blocks the filing of new planned development applications on seven multifamily-zoned properties along the South Flagler Drive corridor. It runs to 20 January 2027.

The seven addresses, as listed in the ordinance reporting:

• 3611 South Flagler Drive
• 3701 South Flagler Drive — Flagler Yacht Club Condominium
• 3800 Washington Road — Portofino South Condominium
• 3901 South Flagler Drive — Harbor Towers & Marina Condominium
• 3906 Washington Road
• 3907 South Flagler Drive
• 3915 South Flagler Drive — Southbridge Condominium

The boundary is south of Monroe Drive, north of Southern Boulevard, between Flagler Drive and Washington Road. The city retained Zyscovich to run the technical analysis, with proposed overlay regulations targeted to come back in January 2027.

It is being called a moratorium. The city says it is not one, and the distinction is the whole point

Almost every account of this vote uses the word moratorium. The city’s own Assistant Development Services Director drew the line explicitly at the meeting:

“We’re proposing a zoning in progress that you can apply for a plan development. If you can come in today and meet the code requirements and build by right, this zoning in progress is not stopping you from doing that. It’s just stopping you from coming in and applying for a plan development at this point for the next six months.”

Angela Jones Vaughn, Assistant Development Services Director, City of West Palm Beach

Read that carefully if you own in one of the seven. Building by right is untouched. What is paused is the planned-development route — the one a developer uses to assemble a whole building and put up something larger than the base code allows. That is the route a nine-figure bulk buyout of an older waterfront condominium actually runs through. It also does not touch applications filed before adoption, and it does not stop anything already under construction.

⭐ The part that did not make most of the coverage: the loudest objectors were unit owners

This was not developers versus residents. About a dozen residents spoke, and the heaviest opposition to the pause came from owners inside the affected buildings — because for them, a bulk sale to a developer is the exit from an assessment they cannot pay.

Owners at the Flagler Yacht Club described reserve assessments driven by Florida’s post-Surfside structural reserve requirements. A board member said an assessment first quoted at $800,000 came in at $2.2 million once bids were received, and that roughly half the building’s owners struggled to pay it.

An assessment first quoted at $800,000 came back at $2.2 million once the bids were in, and about half the building’s owners could not comfortably pay.

Robert Durkin, board member, Flagler Yacht Club, in public comment

Leslie Weinberg, who told the commission she was the first buyer in the Flagler Yacht Club, said her assessment could double or triple next year. Maryanne Chop, another resident, said she had already signed a contract to sell her unit to a developer. From the Portofino at 3800 Washington Road, Elizabeth Gory told commissioners that state-mandated retrofits were forcing older-building owners into a hard decision while a larger tower had already been approved nearby:

“A new 18-story tower already has permission to rise smack dab in the middle of the deliberate district.”

Elizabeth Gory, resident of the Portofino, 3800 Washington Road, speaking as a private citizen

Commissioner Stephen Sylvester, supporting the pause, framed it as the start of a wider rethink rather than a one-off: “Hopefully, this is only the beginning of a broader plan for how we want our neighborhoods to look. One that doesn’t rely on granting an ever-increasing number of variances with each new project.”

Sources: Boca Post, 21 July 2026 — the ordinance number, the unanimous second reading, all seven addresses, and the Vaughn, Durkin, Weinberg, Chop, Gory and Sylvester comments, read directly · Bisnow, 15 July 2026 — the boundary, the 20 January 2027 expiry and the pre-adoption exemption, from before the vote. The meeting date: Boca Post published on Tuesday 21 July and describes the meeting as “Monday,” which is 20 July 2026, consistent with earlier reporting that the second reading was set for that date. The City of West Palm Beach’s adopted-ordinance record has not been retrieved — wpb.org returned HTTP 403 to this machine on 5 September 2026 — so the ordinance text itself has not been read here. ⛔ Reported buyout dollar figures circulating for these buildings are deliberately not printed on this page: they rest on headlines this page could not read in full.

Nobody Publishes a List of Which Condo Buildings Are Due for Inspection. I Went Looking for It.

This file is a negative result, and it is here because a negative result is worth more to you than a guess. There is no public list — state, county or municipal — naming the South Florida condominium buildings whose milestone inspection deadline falls this year. I looked for it, and this is where I looked.

First, a correction to something repeated everywhere: 31 December 2026 is not a cliff

Section 553.899(3), Florida Statutes, is a rolling deadline, not a single date. A building must have its milestone inspection “by December 31 of the year in which the building reaches 30 years of age” and “every 10 years thereafter” — and a local enforcement agency may set the first trigger at 25 years instead.

So 31 December 2026 is the deadline for one cohort: broadly, buildings that turn 30 this year. The large statutory catch-up deadlines have already passed — they fell on 31 December 2024 and 31 December 2025. If someone is selling you urgency built on a single 2026 cliff, the statute does not say that.

Why the list does not exist: the statute never asks for it

Section 553.899(13) sets out what every local enforcement agency must report to the state each year. Read the eight items and the gap is obvious:

• the number of buildings required to have a milestone inspection
• the number with a completed phase one inspection
• the number granted an extension
• the number required to have a phase two inspection
• the number with a completed phase two inspection
• the number, type and value of permit applications received to complete repairs
• a list of buildings deemed to be unsafe or uninhabitable
• the licence number of the responsible building code administrator

Seven of the eight are counts. Exactly one names buildings — and only buildings that have already been found unsafe or uninhabitable. There is no statutory field for “here are the buildings that come due next.” The record everyone assumes exists is not something anyone is required to produce.

Where I looked, county by county

Broward — the most likely to exist, and still unconfirmed. A Board of Rules and Appeals brochure for its building safety inspection programme (dated 2017 on its face) describes the mechanism directly: the Board obtains building data from the Property Appraiser and forwards it to each municipality, and offers the list of buildings that are due, free of charge, to companies that offer inspection services. But the Board’s current programme page carries none of that language, and the PDF it pointed to now returns a 404 (checked 5 September 2026). So the list may well exist internally. It is not published, and the older description of it cannot be confirmed against anything the county currently posts. A single Chapter 119 records request would settle it — and that request has been drafted.

Miami-Dade — fragmented by design. Recertification here does not run on the state statute at all; it runs on Miami-Dade County Code s. 8-11(f), a county programme that predates Surfside and was amended in 2022 to move the initial trigger to 30 years. There are 34 municipalities, each its own local enforcement agency. The county’s searchable recertification portal covers unincorporated Miami-Dade only, is a per-property lookup, and has no bulk export. Miami Beach — the single most consequential jurisdiction for this market — publishes forms, an SOP and fee schedules, and no list of buildings due and no status dashboard.

⚠️ And the file that sounds like the answer is not the answer. The Property Appraiser publishes a free 66MB building-information.xlsx. It was downloaded and parsed for this file. It is a folio, owner, mailing-address and legal-description extract: no year built, no storey count, no certificate-of-occupancy date. It cannot produce this list, and anyone assuming otherwise from the filename will be wrong.

Palm Beach — the weakest of the three. No countywide recertification programme of the Miami-Dade or Broward type was found; the county relies on the state statute, administered municipally. Its reporting discipline is also the worst: per OPPAGA, 17 of 39 Palm Beach municipal building officials — 44 percent — did not report 2025 milestone data to the state at all.

Why I am not going to build the list myself

It can be approximated from the county tax rolls. It should not be published that way, and it is worth saying why in public:

• A certificate-of-occupancy date is not a year built. The statute and the county code both key off the original CO. Property rolls carry “actual year built” and “effective year built” — the latter an assessment construct that moves after renovations. On large towers these differ routinely, by one to three years. For a list whose whole value is naming this year’s cohort, that is exactly where the error lands.
• The roll is parcel-level, not building-level. Every condo unit is its own folio; a 300-unit tower is 300 rows. Collapsing them to buildings is doable and imperfect, and it is the step where a published list quietly acquires mistakes.
• There is no way to give three hundred associations a right of reply. A list of named buildings implicitly accused of a compliance deadline, built on a proxy field the statute does not use, with no way to know which have already been inspected — one wrong building costs more than the whole list is worth.

Sources: s. 553.899, Florida Statutes — subsections (3) and (13) read directly, 5 September 2026 · OPPAGA Report 26-04, July 2026 · Miami-Dade County Code s. 8-11(f) · Broward County Board of Rules and Appeals, programme page checked 5 September 2026. Everything described above as absent was searched for on 5 September 2026 and is recorded here as an absence on that date, not as a permanent state of the world. If any of these bodies publishes such a list, tell me and it will be linked here.

Fannie Mae Tightened Condo Rules on 3 August. The Same Letter Loosened Six Others — Two of Them Florida-Only.

Almost everything written about Fannie Mae’s Lender Letter LL-2026-03 has been about the tightening. That half is real. It is also half. The same nine-page letter retired two requirements that applied to Florida specifically, and a file that tells you condo financing only got harder this year is wrong. It also carries one tightening almost nobody has written about — a $50,000 ceiling on the master policy deductible, in force since 1 July 2026 — which is set out below with the rest.

What got harder

• The Limited Review process is retired. Established projects that used to qualify must now go through Full Review, or the Waiver of Project Review where it applies. Lenders could adopt it early but had to for all loan applications dated on or after 3 August 2026.
• Baseline funding is gone. In Fannie’s words: “Lenders are no longer permitted to use the baseline funding method which is the option that allows the reserve cash balance to approach but never fall below zero.” Where a lender relies on a reserve study, the budget must now include the highest recommended reserve allocation in that study.
• The replacement reserve minimum rises from 10% to 15% of the annual budgeted income assessment — under Full Review, for all loan applications dated on or after 4 January 2027. That one has not landed yet.
• A hard $50,000 cap on the master policy’s per-unit deductible. In the letter’s words: “the maximum allowable per unit deductible for all required property insurance perils covered by a master property insurance policy is $50,000 per unit.” Mandatory for all loan applications dated on or after 1 July 2026 — so it is already in force. Where an association’s master policy carries a deductible above that line, the building fails the test until the policy is rewritten. This is the change most likely to catch a large older Florida building by surprise, because hurricane deductibles are commonly set as a percentage of insured value, and on a big tower that is a far larger number than $50,000.

⭐ What got easier — and this is the part nobody printed

• Florida’s geographic restrictions are gone. Fannie says it plainly in a note: “This change effectively retires the remaining geographic restrictions that apply to the state of Florida.” Retiring Limited Review took the Florida-specific overlay with it.
• ⭐ PERS is retired for new Florida condo projects with attached units. New or newly converted attached-unit projects in Florida no longer have to be submitted to Fannie Mae’s own Project Eligibility Review Service. They can be reviewed “like all other new projects with attached units… under the lender-delegated Full Review process.” Effective immediately on 18 March 2026. For a market whose pre-construction pipeline is the subject of most of this page, that is the single most consequential line in the letter — and it is a loosening.
• The 50% investor concentration limit is retired for established projects reviewed under Full Review on investor loans. ⚠️ The presale requirement is unchanged — at least 50% of units must still have been conveyed or be under contract to owner-occupants or second-home buyers.
• The Waiver of Project Review was expanded.
• Roofs no longer have to be insured on a replacement-cost basis. The letter retires the replacement-cost roof requirement: the master policy must provide replacement-cost coverage “with the exception of roofs.” Actual-cash-value roof coverage now passes.
• Inflation guard coverage is no longer required for projects.

The one thing that survives everything

A project with an “Unavailable” status in Condo Project Manager is ineligible regardless of review type — the letter confirms that check survives even the expanded waiver. The determination is made at project level, so it applies to every unit in the building at once. That is what “cash-only” actually means in practice: not that a lender declined you, but that the building is off the list before your file is opened.

⛔ And here is what this page will not do. You will find figures circulating for how many South Florida buildings are on that list — most commonly 696 in the tri-county area out of 1,438 statewide. Fannie Mae has never published the list. Those numbers come from a copy obtained by a law firm from a confidential source and reported by trade press in April 2025 — roughly seventeen months old, not a primary record, and not something this page will print as current. No 2026 figure has been published by anyone as of 5 September 2026. An association can check its own status through Fannie Mae’s Condo Status Finder, and there is an appeal process. That makes the association — not a broker, and not this page — the right party to ask.

Sources: Fannie Mae Lender Letter LL-2026-03, 18 March 2026 (PDF, 9pp) — every quotation above was read directly from that letter on 5 September 2026. Fannie Mae’s site refuses automated fetch; the letter was read through a render proxy. ⚠️ Freddie Mac issued Bulletin 2026-C the same day, 18 March 2026, on the same subject. This page has NOT read it — the Guide URL returns only its navigation shell to automated retrieval, and the only accounts of its contents I could reach were vendor blogs, which are not sources this page uses. Nothing above is claimed about Freddie Mac. Statutory context on Florida reserve pauses: s. 718.112(2)(f)–(g), F.S.

The State’s Report Says 19 Aventura Buildings Were Deemed Unsafe. The City Says the Number Is Zero.

Two official records. One flat contradiction. Both are citable, and this file takes no position on which is right — because the useful finding is that they cannot both be right, and the disagreement is about your building.

What the state’s report says

OPPAGA Report 26-04, the Florida Legislature’s own research office, July 2026, on unsafe or uninhabitable buildings identified by 2025 phase two milestone inspections:

“The City of Aventura and North Miami reported buildings that were deemed unsafe or uninhabitable. The City of Aventura reported that 19 condominium and cooperative buildings were determined unsafe or uninhabitable…”

OPPAGA Report 26-04, July 2026

OPPAGA also asked whether those buildings had been vacated. Aventura did not respond to that request.

That stat is the whole reason this file exists. OPPAGA reports 24 buildings statewide identified as unsafe or uninhabitable in 2025, spread across eight counties. Nineteen of them — nearly four in five — were reported by a single city of roughly 40,000 people. A number that concentrated is either a genuine and serious cluster, or a reporting artefact. It is not a normal distribution either way.

What the city says

The City of Aventura’s answer is unambiguous, on the record, and specific about the cause. Its spokesperson told WLRN on 31 July 2026:

“Aventura has zero unsafe structures.”

Evan Ross, spokesperson, City of Aventura

“We think it was just an error that classified 19 buildings as unsafe that aren’t unsafe.”

Evan Ross, spokesperson, City of Aventura

The city said it was asking OPPAGA to revise the report. As of 5 September 2026, Report 26-04 as published still carries the figure of 19. That is stated as a fact about the document, not as a judgement about the city’s explanation, which is entirely plausible — and File 11 on this page sets out exactly how it could happen.

⭐ Why a classification error is not a reassuring explanation

Take the city’s account at face value and the problem does not go away, it moves. The statute that requires officials to report a list of buildings that are “unsafe or uninhabitable” never defines either word. OPPAGA found building officials across Florida “using multiple approaches” to decide. So if 19 buildings were classified into a category the state has not defined, that is the system working as written.

And the error does not only run in one direction. A member of the Legislature reviewing the same report put the opposite worry on the record:

“It doesn’t paint a confident picture of where we are with a lot of these buildings. I think there were a lot of buildings that could have been probably deemed unsafe that weren’t. There needs to be a stronger enforcement mechanism from the state on this reporting process.”

Rep. Juan Carlos Porras (R-Miami)

One city says its 19 are false positives. A state legislator says the bigger risk is false negatives. Both are talking about the same dataset, and there is currently no way for a member of the public to check either claim — because the buildings are not named anywhere public.

The part that is fixable, and how

Section 553.899(13), Florida Statutes makes “a list of buildings deemed to be unsafe or uninhabitable” a mandatory reporting field — the only one of the eight that names buildings at all (see File 13). So DBPR should hold the actual addresses behind the number 19. They have not been published anywhere. A Chapter 119 public records request would produce them, and one has been drafted for exactly that.

Sources: OPPAGA Report 26-04, Milestone Inspection Reporting Data 2024 and 2025, July 2026 — the Aventura passage and the statewide count of 24 read directly from the report on 5 September 2026 · WLRN / News Service of Florida, 31 July 2026 — the Evan Ross and Rep. Porras quotations. The City of Aventura’s position is quoted here in full and at length because it is the answer to the finding, not a footnote to it. If the city or OPPAGA issues a revision, this file will be updated and the change noted.

Twenty-Seven Buyers Paid $81.8 Million at Salato. The County Values Their Homes at $5.7 Million.

This one is not a scandal. Nobody has done anything wrong, and the developer, the county and the buyers are all behaving exactly as the law provides. It is a trap, and it catches people who buy new construction in Florida every single year.

Salato Pompano Beach, 305 Briny Avenue. Forty residential condominium folios on the Broward County Property Appraiser’s 2026 tax roll. Twenty-seven of them recorded a deed to a third-party buyer between 15 May and 30 July 2026, at recorded consideration from $1,999,000 to $5,295,000. The other thirteen are still titled to the developer entity.

Add up what those twenty-seven buyers paid: $81,818,000.

Now add up what the county says those same twenty-seven homes are worth on the 2026 roll: $5,659,740.

Every one of the forty folios carries a building value of $0. Every one is coded “10 — Vacant commercial.” Just value equals land value exactly, on all of them. The year built on the roll reads 2026, and the legal description cites the recorded declaration of condominium — so the building exists and the declaration is recorded. The improvement simply is not on the assessment roll yet.

Unit 301 is the clean worked example. 1,957 square feet. Sold for $1,999,000 on 29 May 2026. 2026 just value: $195,850. Building value: $0. The county’s number is 9.8 percent of what the buyer paid. The top sale in the building, unit 801 at $5,295,000 on 22 June 2026, sits on the roll at $309,440.

Why this happens, and it is not anyone’s fault

Section 192.042, Florida Statutes, sets the assessment date, and the sentence that governs this entire file is short:

“Real property, on January 1 of each year. Improvements or portions not substantially completed on January 1 shall have no value placed thereon.”

s. 192.042, Florida Statutes — Date of assessment

Salato was not substantially completed on 1 January 2026. So the 2026 roll values the land and nothing else. That is the statute working exactly as written. The first assessment roll that can carry the finished building is 1 January 2027 — which lands on the tax bill that goes out in late 2027.

There is a second signal in the same records pointing the same way. All twenty-seven sales carry the Property Appraiser’s verification flag “Excluded Sale.” Not one is flagged “Qualified.” That is the ordinary marker for first closings out of a developer, and it means these transactions are excluded from the county’s own sale study. The building’s eighty-two million dollars of sales are not yet informing the county’s valuation of it.

⭐ The part that generalises — and this is why the file is here

Nothing about this is specific to Salato. Every newly delivered condominium tower in Florida goes through exactly this window, and the window is at its widest for a buyer who closes early in the year after topping out. During it:

• The tax figure attached to your unit is derived from land alone. If you are estimating carrying costs from the county’s current number, you are estimating from a number that is about to change by a multiple.
• The proration at your closing table is calculated on that same land-only figure. A seller credit computed against $195,850 does not protect a buyer whose next-but-one bill is assessed on a finished residence.
• There is no arm’s-length comparable in the building yet. Every sale is a developer sale, every sale is flagged Excluded, and no resale has occurred. Anyone valuing your unit is valuing it off the developer’s own price sheet.

Sources: Broward County Property Appraiser, 2026 tax roll, all forty 494306TB#### folios at 305 Briny Avenue, Pompano Beach — retrieved from web.bcpa.net/bcpaclient and held as a full local extract; every figure above (the 13/27 split, the $81,818,000, the $5,659,740, the 14.5× ratio and both worked examples) was computed directly from that extract for this file, not taken from a summary. Declaration of condominium recorded under Broward CIN# 120845937. Statutory basis: s. 192.042, Florida Statutes, read 5 September 2026. Roll positions move. This is the 2026 roll as it stood when the extract was taken; check the current folio before relying on any figure here for a transaction.

The City Says Amrit Has No Final Certificate of Occupancy. The Same Official Says He Found No Major Problems.

Both of those sentences are true, both were said by the same person on the same evening, and a file that prints only one of them is doing propaganda rather than reporting. Here is the whole of what the record says about Amrit Ocean Resort & Residences, 3100 North Ocean Drive, Singer Island, Riviera Beach.

What the city’s building official told the council

At the Riviera Beach City Council meeting of Wednesday 5 August 2026, city Building Official Michael Grimm told council members that Amrit still does not have a final certificate of occupancy. The outstanding items he listed: threshold inspection certifications, repairs to portions of the parking garage, work on a parking ramp, and the closeout of dozens of permits.

Individual units have received certificates of occupancy. The building has not received a final one. Those are different documents and the distinction is the entire point of this file.

And in the same breath, the same official said this:

“I did not find any major problems.”

Michael Grimm, Building Official, City of Riviera Beach — 5 August 2026

“I would not have issued certificates of occupancy for those individual units if I felt there were life-safety issues.”

Michael Grimm, Building Official, City of Riviera Beach — 5 August 2026

At the same meeting, Police Chief Michael Coleman reported that his department had reviewed the complaints with the FBI and the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office. Investigators found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing and concluded the disputes are civil matters rather than criminal ones. That finding runs here at the top rather than buried, because it is the single most important thing anyone reading about this building needs to know.

What is disputed, and disputed is what it is

The homeowners association has sued the developer, the general contractor and the design professionals. Its attorney, Daniel Levin, says engineers retained by the association identified defects in “nearly every major system of the building, including water intrusion, deteriorating concrete, waterproofing failures, and corrosion.”

⛔ That is an allegation in a filed lawsuit. It is not a finding. No court has ruled on it, this page does not predict how it resolves, and the city’s own building official has said on the record that he found no major problems. Both things are currently true at the same time, and anyone telling you the question is settled is telling you something the record does not support.

⭐ The part that actually changes a purchase: this was approved as a hotel

City planning records from 2015 show the project was approved under resort-hotel zoning, not residential zoning. The recorded declaration of condominium says the units are “not permanent residences.”

That language has a direct financial consequence, and the county’s own Property Appraiser has explained it publicly. Dorothy Jacks said the declaration language affects whether buyers can qualify for Florida’s homestead exemption — and that her office saw it coming:

“We contacted the developer probably close to three years ago and invited them into our office to say this is going to be a problem… this document is going to continue to be a problem until you have it changed, adjusted or otherwise.”

Dorothy Jacks, Palm Beach County Property Appraiser

The developer’s answer, on the record, is that buyers were told. In a statement to CBS12 it said purchasers were clearly informed that “the units were not approved for permanent residential use and must be offered as transient lodging,” and that “homestead eligibility is determined solely by the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser and was never guaranteed.”

Sources: CBS12 / WPEC I-Team, 5 August 2026 — the council meeting, the Grimm and Coleman statements and the Levin quotation, read directly · CBS12 / WPEC I-Team, 23 February 2026 — the declaration language, the Dorothy Jacks quotations, the 2015 resort-hotel approval and the developer’s own statement, read directly. What has NOT been retrieved and is therefore not relied on here: the council meeting minutes or video; the declaration of condominium’s book and page in the Palm Beach County official records; the circuit court case number for the association’s suit; and the 2015 ordinance or resolution number. The Palm Beach County Clerk’s official-records and docket sites did not respond to this machine on 5 September 2026. Every fact above rests on named officials speaking on the record at a public meeting, or on documents described by the officials who hold them. Re-checked 7 September 2026: still no final certificate of occupancy reported, and nothing newer than the 5 August 2026 council meeting was found. Status unchanged.

Three Towers, and Nobody Can Tell You How Many Homes Are in Them

This file needs no developer’s cooperation and makes no accusation. It is three towers, three sets of numbers, and every figure below was read off the developer’s own website or a dated news report on 5 September 2026. In all three cases the developer’s own published count does not match the count in circulation — and in one case it does not reconcile with it under any reading.

1. Mercedes-Benz Places, Brickell — 821, or 791, or 965

JDS Development’s own portfolio page, stamped last updated 6 August 2026, gives a single figure under the label “Number of Units: 821” — alongside “67 Stories” and “+/- 2,500,000 GSF”. It publishes no breakdown between residences and hotel keys.

Bisnow, reporting the foreclosure on 6 April 2026, describes the building as “791 condos, a 174-key hotel and 200K SF of office space.”

Those do not reconcile. 791 condos plus 174 keys is 965. The developer’s 821 is neither 791 nor 965, and because it carries no breakdown there is no way to tell from the outside what it counts.

For the record: this page prints 791 in File 02 and in the delivery tracker, because that is the figure attached to a dated news report. This file is the footnote explaining that the developer’s own site says something else.

2. 619 Brickell by Nobu — 300 or 296, 74 storeys or 75

Nobu’s own residences page states “300 residences” in a “74-story tower.” It gives no height at all.

Coverage at launch reported 296 residences and 75 storeys. Two different heights circulate for the same building — 860 feet and 886 feet.

Four residences and one storey are not much. Twenty-six feet of a named building’s height is not a rounding difference, and neither number comes from the developer, because the developer does not publish one.

3. The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Brickell Key — the developer does not publish a total

Swire Properties’ own development page gives “228 luxury branded Mandarin Oriental Residences” in a tower “approximately 800 ft tall”. For the second tower — “approximately 400 ft” — it describes the flagship hotel “along with additional private Residences for sale” and attaches no number to them.

So the developer publishes a partial count. Every total in circulation for this project is therefore somebody else’s addition, and the residences in the hotel tower are being counted by people who did not build it.

⭐ Why this matters more than it looks

None of this is necessarily wrong, and none of it is necessarily dishonest. Unit counts genuinely move between announcement, zoning approval, permit filing and delivery. Floors get combined. Plans change. A developer updating a figure is a developer doing its job.

The failure is not that the numbers change. It is that they circulate undated. And the denominator is load-bearing in ways buyers rarely think about:

• “Ninety percent sold” is meaningless without it. Ninety percent of 296 and ninety percent of 821 are different buildings and different levels of risk.
• The HOA budget is divided by it. Your monthly is a function of total shared cost over total units. A count that moves by thirty moves your number.
• Amenity, parking, and elevator ratios are all per unit. The same amenity deck across 296 homes is a different product from the same deck across 821.

Sources: JDS Development, Mercedes-Benz Places project page (page stamped “Last Updated: August 6, 2026”) · Bisnow, 6 April 2026 · Nobu Hotels, 619 Brickell residences page · Swire Properties, The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Miami. All four developer and news pages were read directly on 5 September 2026; the figures above are quoted as they appeared on that date and these pages change without notice. Next step on the height question: the FAA’s obstruction evaluation records carry a filed height for tall structures near airspace, which is a free federal record and would settle 860 against 886 without anyone’s cooperation. That check has not been run yet and no height is asserted here.

The Standing Record

Individual files are the news. The pattern is the Miami Pre-Construction Delivery Tracker — 38 South Florida towers, what each promised buyers at launch, what it promises now, and how many times the date has moved.

22 have slipped at least once across 33 documented slips. 14 are selling with no construction loan reported by any source. Five are stalled or in litigation. Eight have no completion date on the public record at all — three where the developer has never stated one, five where no primary source publishes one. And exactly one has ever moved its date forward: Cipriani Residences Miami, from 2028 to summer 2027.