Miami’s Condo Expert
Peter Zalewski is a former financial journalist, a Wall Street consultant, a licensed Florida real estate broker and an expert witness who has been admitted to the Florida Circuit Court and U.S. Bankruptcy Court.
Peter moved to Miami in 1993 to work as a reporter for Miami Today newspaper. It was Peter’s second reporting job - the first was in the Greater Minneapolis area - after graduating with a bachelors of journalism from the University of Missouri. During his journalism career, Peter worked at the Miami Daily Business Review, South Florida Business Journal and the WorldCity newspaper.
Peter left journalism in 2006 to launch Condo Vultures® as a data-driven, buyside brokerage and consultancy to capitalize on Miami’s overbuilding that spectacularly crashed in 2008.
During the Great Recession, Peter worked with individual investors, hedge funds, family offices and university endowments to acquire blocks of condo units at dramatic discounts that represented a fraction of the retail prices. Many transactions traded at prices that were below replacement cost.
Peter attracted local, state, national and international press attention from news outlets such as The Economist magazine to South China Morning Post, CBS’ 60 Minutes news program to NBC’s The Today Show, and The New York Times to The Financial Times.
Filmmaker Michael Moore included Peter in his 2009 documentary “Capitalism: A Love Story” that documented the leadup to the Great Recession.
In 2011 when the Miami condo market began another boom cycle, Peter began writing a column for the Miami Herald as well as The Real Deal. (Peter ultimately wrote regular columns - which were always about different subjects - for both publications until 2016.)
That same year of 2011, Peter began to create the subscription-based CraneSpotters.com website to document all of the new towers that were being proposed in the tricounty South Florida region of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
CraneSpotters.com became the go-to website for buyers and real estate professionals trying to get back into the game of flipping preconstruction condos. The Miami Association of Realtors established an exclusive relationship with CraneSpotters.com in 2014 so that its members could utilize Peter’s proprietary information.
After a two-year hiatus traveling the world and visiting places such as Dubai, Ho Chi Min and Mumbai, Peter returned to Miami in 2018 to get back to work with Condo Vultures® and CraneSpotters.com.
In that same year of 2018, Peter also became the Director of Acquisitions for the Miami-based private equity fund called Brickell Ventures Ltd.
After the pandemic shut down the world, Peter launched the "Miami Real Estate Investing Podcast With Peter Zalewski Of Condo Vultures®" on the platform Anchor, which subsequently was purchased by Spotify.
As the pandemic subsided, Peter went back to work in earnest.
In 2022, Peter ramped up the "Miami Real Estate Investing Podcast With Peter Zalewski Of Condo Vultures®" from audio-only to an audio-and-video format that is now featured on Spotify and all platforms that support video podcasts. The video version of the podcast is also available on YouTube.com where the handle is CondoVulturesTV.
Some 30 years after first arriving in Miami, Peter launched this Substack account in June 2023 to share his institutional knowledge, market intelligence and educated opinion about Miami’s volatile condo market.
Why not subscribe to our email service or join the Miami Condo Market Intelligence Club™?
