Swire's Mandarin Oriental towers clear $240M Brickell Key permit

South Florida’s largest single building permit of the month has been issued, and it belongs to Swire Properties. The City of Miami Building Department released permit BD23028760001B001 on July 16, a $239,983,665 record covering 1,351,367 sq ft of new construction at 1 Island Drive on Brickell Key, with Moss & Associates listed as contractor. That is the paperwork that lets The Residences at Mandarin Oriental, Miami go vertical.

Why it matters

Permit issuance is the moment a Miami tower stops being a rendering and becomes a construction schedule. Swire filed for these towers in early December 2023, and they sat under review while the developer closed the old hotel, cleared the site, and kept selling. For anyone underwriting Brickell Key or competing for the same buyer, the review clock just ended: roughly 31 months from filing to issuance on a project of this scale is the number to plan against, not the one in a pro forma template.

It also resets the supply picture at the very top of the market. Our own tracking of the permit wire shows nothing else in Miami-Dade this month within an order of magnitude of this valuation.

The numbers

The permit record states a $239,983,665 valuation across 1,351,367 sq ft, classified as new commercial construction, issued by the City of Miami Building Department. The project itself is two towers designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox: a residential tower of roughly 800 ft and 66 stories holding 228 private residences, and a roughly 400-ft hotel tower with 66 private residences, 121 guest rooms, and 28 hotel residences, per Swire and the architect. Swire imploded the former Mandarin Oriental hotel on the site in April 2026. PROFILEmiami reported the project had reached $1.3 billion in residential sales by that point, including a pair of penthouses that traded for a combined $100 million in March.

Completion is anticipated in 2030.

What’s next

Watch for the mobilization of Moss & Associates on the island and the shift from site work to foundations. Swire’s own timeline put vertical construction in the first half of 2026 and groundbreaking later in the year, so the issued permit puts the project back inside its stated window. More permit-wire coverage runs on our South Florida hub.