South Beach, Brickell See Four New Cond Projects Planned

MIAMI—The new condo developments just keep springing up in South Florida. Four new condo towers—two in South Beach and another two on Brickell Avenue—are in the works. That brings the number of planned buildings to 50 since the real estate bubble busted in 2007. So says a report from CondoVultures.

Altogether, more than 8,600 condo units are proposed for Miami, Broward and Palm Beach counties, according to the Preconstruction Condo Projects list compiled by the licensed Florida brokerage CVR Realty. Peter Zalewski, principal analyst at CondoVultures, tells GlobeSt.com he expects that number to rise to about 10,000 by the end of the year.

“There are still about 3,400 unsold condo units from the boom in the Tri-County area,” Zalewski says. “We are aware of another nine projects that haven’t formally announced yet. So it’s likely that we’ll have three times the amount of inventory going up as what’s unsold by the end of the year.”

CondoVultures reports that one new tower has already been completed in the Tri-County area in the five years since the South Florida Condo market started slowing. Ten other high-rises are under construction. The condo development trend is pushing the risk to buyers, who are putting down as much as 80 percent during construction.

“The anticipation is that all of the bust era units are going to be gone by the end of next year,” says Zalewski. “By the time the new units come online in 14 developers are hoping they can hit just right.”

Of course, anything can happen between now and 2014. Beyond the U.S. economy, foreign market fluctuations could put a damper on plans. If the euro and the Brazilian real decline, that could slow interest from foreign buyers who have held up the condo market in recent years. Even with deposits, there is no guarantee the buyers will close.

“The bottom line is we are in a condo construction boom again,” Zalewski says. “This is the next generation of condo product and from what we can gather there are maybe 10,000 units coming online compared to the last boom where there were 49,000. So we are already at effectively 20% of what we had in the last boom and we are very early on still in the cycle.”