A Davie millwork subcontractor says it is still owed six figures on the amenities package, the second contractor dispute to hit the delivering condo this summer.
Condo Development
The for-sale tower playbook: where new condos pencil, how presales and deposits fund them, and the entitlement and demand fights that decide which projects rise.
Condominium development runs on a different engine than rental. Buyers put down deposits years before a tower tops out, and those presales, often 40 to 60 percent of units, are what unlocks the construction loan. That makes the sales pace, the deposit structure, and buyer confidence as central to a condo pro forma as land cost or rates.
The action clusters where for-sale demand is deepest and most global: South Florida and New York lead, with luxury and branded product drawing cash buyers while attainable for-sale housing stays scarce. When rates rise or a market softens, condo starts stall first, because a project that cannot presell cannot fund, so the beat is an early read on where capital and buyer appetite are heading.
This hub tracks new condo projects, presale milestones, deposit and financing structures, and the entitlement battles behind for-sale towers. Every figure traces to a primary source.
The developers on this beat
The firms our condo development coverage names, most-covered first, with the number of stories naming each one.
Latest coverage
The scaled-back condo plan keeps the tenanted building along Wilton Drive standing while replacing the parcel's underused east-side structure.
A two-year sheriff's probe accuses a property manager and five others of draining association accounts. For anyone buying or lending on South Florida condo stock, it is a new line item to check first.
The developer is still unnamed. The land, and the math that unlocks it, are not.
Kolter Urban and Perko priced a 10,190-square-foot Maison d'Or penthouse at $39.7M, about $3,895/sf, above much of West Palm's Flagler corridor.
A completed, closing, 85%-sold tower is a live data point for anyone underwriting condo in south Broward.
A buyer with no retail track record wrote a nine-figure-adjacent check for a Doral shopping center, a signal that grocery anchors are pulling capital from outside the sector even as SoFla office and condo distress dominates headlines.
The county's own record puts a nine-figure number on the vertical phase of a 57-story Edgewater tower, filed under an entity our records already tie to Grupo T&C.
Justice Andrew Borrok's temporary order buys Penn-Florida time on the Mandarin Oriental Boca Raton condo tower, but the underlying mortgage foreclosure keeps running in Palm Beach County.
Unit S-1003 traded all-cash for nearly triple the price per foot of other Miami-Dade luxury condo contracts signed the same week.
Allen Morris unveiled Meyer Davis's amenity program at Ponce Park in Coral Gables, the design detail behind the tower's pre-close sales push.
A New York countersuit accuses Madison Realty of installing an inexperienced decision maker and ordering vendors starved, raising the stakes on lender control of branded-condo construction.
The eight-story project is the third disclosed Coconut Grove groundbreaking or delivery in three days, evidence the neighborhood's small-site pipeline is running hot.
Alta Developers sold off the last big retail block at its 2019 Biscayne Boulevard tower to a Hollywood-based shopping center buyer.
A Miami luxury developer imports a hospitality brand from Brickell's playbook and plants it in downtown West Palm Beach first.
The delivered 45-unit condo is a hard data point on pricing power for Grove product, not a developer's estimate.
Mezzanine debt to finish a condo tower mid-construction is what the South Florida capital stack costs right now.
A direct read of all 35 folios at Wynwood Lofts shows a unit-by-unit buyout that outran the paperwork used to spot condo assemblages, with one holdout unit standing between the group and full control.
A neighborhood developers were still buying block by block a year ago now has eight residential towers in the pipeline, and the land basis is moving to match.
A court record confirms the suit, filed Aug. 14, and shows plaintiffs moved for a preliminary injunction three days later.
The country's largest luxury for-sale builder posted a delivery-versus-contract split that reads as demand holding, not breaking, even as margin compressed.
A New York judge has already blocked the lender's UCC auction once, with a hearing set for October 1.
A KBRA presale report puts a hard leverage number on a large SFR portfolio clearing the securitization market, useful math for anyone with 2026 debt coming due.
El-Ad says summer momentum pushed Alina past $90 million this year. The county's own deed record shows a lower number, and a closing date that predates the claim.
The 25-story Clear Lake tower moved past $125 million in sales before its groundbreaking cleared the ground floor.
The city's Aug. 11 cease-and-desist letter accuses a 43-story Brickell tower of running as an unlicensed hotel, a warning shot for condo-as-rental underwriting.
A single-family builder just got a Broward city to sign off on high-rise rentals, and that is the density test other sponsors will point to next.
Harvey Hernandez's Newgard Group is trading condo towers for car garages, and paying a big premium to do it in West Palm Beach.
An aviation executive paid $19M for a Surf Club Four Seasons unit in Surfside as a $31.5M ask topped Miami-Dade's weekly luxury contracts.
Related Group and BH Group have pulled the tower cranes at the $700M+ Residences at Six Fisher Island as podium, amenity deck and pool work advance.
A roofing supplier filed a $76,249.87 lien suit against the recreation tract at Palm Greens, a Delray Beach condo association already in Chapter 11.
Turnberry Isle condo owners sue Jeffrey Soffer's YCM and Aventura, alleging a 2023 ordinance redefined site size to dodge a required owner vote.
Dezer Development's 62-story Bentley Residences has reached 13 stories in Sunny Isles Beach, even as Miami-Dade's tax roll still lists the site as vacant land.
The headline is the sale. The story for developers is the per-door math on a 36-year-old complex bought whole and put back to work as rentals.
The Brooklyn-based developer is self-performing as general contractor on a site it bought for $27 million in 2021, targeting a 2028 delivery.
LD&D and ONE Capital say Surf Row Residences is 50% sold in Surfside, after the project was downsized from eight $5M-plus townhomes to 24 condos in 2024.
Belgium's Versluys Group joins Miami's Prosper Group on a $50 million Brickell River assemblage, planning a 60-story, 181-unit tower worth $650 million.
Every conventional condo loan now needs a full look at the association's finances, no more shortcut for buyers with bigger down payments.
The South End's first new condo project to reach the building stage in two decades goes to market with units priced past $40 million.
The developer and the building's own homeowners association are now on the same side of a filed complaint against the general contractor.
Kempinski's US debut gets its interiors. The land underneath it traded for $33.6 million two years before pricing opened above $1.5 million a unit.
A 670-unit condo priced from the $450,000s is a bet that stadium-adjacent Miami Gardens, not the coastal corridor, is where the next wave of SoFla buyers gets housed.
The lawsuit accuses the New York lender, which took the tower via a 2024 UCC foreclosure, of diverting dues and letting concrete and waterproofing failures go unaddressed.
Mana Common spent $33M in 10 days on downtown Miami's Historic Post Office and 23 One Flagler condo units, growing an 80-plus-building portfolio.
A New York family agreed to pay $47M for a penthouse at the 50-story St. Regis Residences in Brickell, a tower that will not be finished until late 2027.
The 62-story South Tower's 10,000-cubic-yard mat pour is the schedule marker that calls vertical trades to the Sunny Isles Beach site.
The county's own parcel record still codes the 1.49-acre site as vacant land, even with a tower standing on it.
Two master permits, one folio, two general contractors. The tightest vertical spend per acre in Miami-Dade right now.
The loan did not clear on the sponsor's name. It cleared on a presale book that was functionally sold out before a shovel moved.
Koch money is showing up in Keys hospitality, and the exit is a villa sale, not a room night.
The largest South Florida distress event of the month is an 11-year luxury project that missed its completion deadline with buyers already suing.
Brickell's supertall era clears a structural milestone, and the pre-sales say the luxury demand behind it is real, not speculative.
A developer and its general contractor are now fighting in court over a nine-figure condo, and the fault line is a lift station and a lien.
The condo owners terminated the association first, then the building sold whole. Deconversion is becoming a repeatable acquisition strategy in Palm Beach County.
The Design District has never had a condo to sell. The first ask sets the neighborhood's opening number at more than $3,300 a foot.
Another Silicon Valley name plants a flag in Coconut Grove. The migration is still the strongest tailwind under the Grove's prices.
The family that built West Palm's superyacht marina just sold it to its own development partner. The entitlement is 2.6M sq ft.
The pitch is not luxury. It is a new-construction condo priced below the median existing house.
The permit that had been under review since December 2023 is now issued. Brickell Key's biggest bet can go vertical.
Rockwell Group interiors, Arquitectonica towers, and a European hotel brand's first US residential bet, all on Biscayne Boulevard.
Two more ultra-luxury towers clear the design board, a sign the Edgewater and Brickell branded-condo bid is still building.
A $3,700-per-foot presale on the river tells developers the luxury bid has moved off the beach and onto Miami's western waterfront.
Fifteen straight months of weak sentiment and record incentive use reset what builders will pay for land and lots.
The product is the story: fully furnished, short-term-rental-ready condos aimed at buyers who want to rent by the night.
A nine-figure loan on a 112-unit beachfront condo shows for-sale capital is still flowing to the right Jersey Shore address.
In one of the country's hottest condo submarkets, the entitlement clock just became the deal.
Florida's milestone-inspection data has stopped describing a statewide problem and started describing a Miami-Dade one.
Coral Gables keeps drawing ultra-luxury vertical, and this one already has its construction loan closed.
Kolter's methodical, block-by-block buying is the playbook for entitling an oceanfront tower where no single seller controls the land.
Office-to-resi gets the headlines, but the sharper conversion math is often in oddball assets.
The small-format for-sale bet on downtown's north edge is now cleared to build.
The joint venture cleared the last units on a Collins Avenue block it wants to redevelop into an ultra-low-density luxury condo.
The recommendation clears one hurdle for a condo-hotel that would add height and floor area to a Collins Avenue landmark closed since 2017.
The Toledano-led partnership takes full control of a site Related assembled for $51M in 2022.
The rebrand moves the oceanfront property from Marriott's W flag to Hilton's luxury banner two years after a $400M-plus purchase.
Wedged between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, the small Broward city has become a spillover magnet for South Florida capital.
Frequently asked
- Why do condo developers rely on presales before construction?
- Lenders for a for-sale tower usually require a large share of units, commonly 40 to 60 percent, to be under contract with nonrefundable deposits before they release the construction loan. Those deposits and contracts prove demand and de-risk the loan, so presales effectively fund and gate the project. A condo that cannot hit its presale threshold typically cannot start, which is why sales pace matters as much as land or rates.
- How is condo development different from rental apartment development?
- A rental building is held and leased over time, underwritten to ongoing rents and financed against long-term cash flow. A condo is sold unit by unit, underwritten to a sellout at projected prices, and financed largely against presale deposits. That makes condos more sensitive to buyer confidence and rate moves in the short run: when demand cools, condo starts stall before rental starts do.