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TOPIC / CONDO / 84 STORIES

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

Distress & Opportunity / South Florida

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.

08.28.26 · 2 min read
Capital & Deals / South Florida

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.

08.25.26 · 1 min read
Distress & Opportunity / South Florida

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.

08.23.26 · 2 min read
Development / South Florida

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.

08.19.26 · 2 min read
Development / South Florida

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.

08.07.26 · 2 min read

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.