Have Miami Beach Condo Sellers Begun To Capitulate As Supply Hits 15 Months?
In this latest issue of the Miami Condo Market Intelligence Report™, we examine the Miami Beach condo market at the halfway point of the 2024-25 Winter Buying Season.
Volume 2025, Issue 7 (Subscribe here)
For this week’s Miami Condo Market Intelligence Report™ newsletter, we examine the Miami Beach condo market at the halfway point of the 2024-25 South Florida Winter Buying Season that stretches from November through April.
It is unclear at this point how the start of the 2025 Florida Condo Association Financial Cliff is impacting the City of Miami Beach market, which is defined as 87th Terrace south to South Pointe Drive on the barrier island, and the Atlantic Ocean west to Biscayne Bay and/or the Intracoastal Waterway.
In anticipation of this pivotal year for Florida condos following new laws implemented in the wake of the Surfside tragedy, we dug into the current listings and the final 2024 condo statistics to evaluate how the Miami Beach market is performing.
The metrics are not encouraging.
We discovered that the Miami Beach condo market - which was a sellers market in 2021, 2022 and less so in 2023 - is firmly in a buyers market, according to statistics compiled by the buyside brokerage CondoVulturesRealty.com.
Currently, Miami Beach has more than 15 months of supply listed for resale, a little more than one month into the start of the 2025 Condo Cliff.
In 2024, buyers purchased an average of about 139 condo units monthly in Miami Beach.
If the 2024 transaction pace were to continue in 2025, it would take five financial quarters for all of the units to trade if no new listings were put on the market.
This seems unlikely as cash-strapped unit owners are facing skyrocketing maintenance fees, hefty special assessments and stubbornly high mortgage rates.
As a rule of thumb, a balanced market has about six months of supply available for resale. More months indicates a buyers market and less months a sellers market.
In terms of the strength of the Miami Beach market, the number of resale listings is growing but at a much slower pace percentage wise as the number of condos going under contract.
This suggests that buyers are suddenly willing to pay record high prices despite headwinds, or more likely sellers have started to accept deep discounts to unload their units.
We will not know until the current block of pending sales eventually transacts within the next 60 days.
Consider that on Jan. 1, 2025, Miami Beach had about 1,955 condos listed for resale and about 115 units under contract, according to the Miami Condo Cliff Index™.