🏡 High on Supply

Happy Friday Highest & Best! This week we’re going tall:

🏡 Inventory of for-sale homes in Florida is climbing.

🏗 Billionaire Ken Griffin is moving forward with a Miami skyscraper

🏎 The list of Miami car-themed condos grows by one.

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Let’s get to it!

More Homes for Sale!

Something happened in February.

Florida homeowners began listing more properties for sale last month, sending inventory across several regions popping to (at least) 18-month highs.

🏡 In Miami-Dade County, there were 2,020 condos listed for sale last month— a 53% increase from a year earlier, according to a report this week by appraiser Miller Samuel and brokerage Douglas Elliman. It was the first month since March 2021 that condo listings topped 2,000.

🏡 In Palm Beach County, single-family home listings jumped 54% to 1,267, the most for any month since June 2022. Condo listings surged 53% to 1,734. There haven’t been that many condos listed for sale in a month since January 2020, the pre-pandemic period before Florida’s mass in-migration.

🏡 Florida’s Gulf Coast region, the area where Hurricane Ian, the state’s costliest storm, wreaked havoc last year, saw more significant jumps in listings:

Lee County, which includes the cities of Fort Myers and Sanibel, saw single-family home listings climb by 79% to 1,600 listings last month, Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman said. That’s the greatest number of monthly listings since June 2022.

Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, had 1,058 new single-family home listings last month. That’s the most since September 2022.

“It’s real,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel. “There is a fair amount of supply coming — but it’s slightly exaggerated because it’s coming from a low starting point.”

Florida, like many other places, has been suffering from a chronically low inventory of homes to buy. Demand from new residents has kept sales humming, while longtime homeowners have been reluctant to list their properties so long as high mortgage rates make it difficult for them to buy something new.

But don’t get your Florida price choppers out just yet:

While inventory is the highest in a while, the pace of home sales across all those markets still remains brisk, the firms’ data show. To wit:

🏃‍♂️ It would take only 3.8 months to sell all those condos in Palm Beach County at the current pace of sales. Compare that to March 2019, when there were fewer condos listed for sale, but the sales pace was 8.8 months to clear them all.

🏃‍♂️ in Miami, clearing February’s new condo inventory would take only 1.7 months. Last February, the pace was 1.1 months.

“It’s just slower than it was a year ago, or two years ago, when it was blistering,” Miller said. “We’re still moving faster than pre-pandemic.”

Citadel’s Ken Griffin Still Plans to Build that $1 Billion Office 

If you’re going to pay a record price for waterfront land in Miami, you might as well go ahead and build a skyscraper.

Billionaire hedge fund founder Ken Griffin signaled this week that his long-planned office tower in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood is, indeed, a go.

Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, hired international architect Foster & Partners to design the building, the Wall Street Journal reported this week. The planned 1,049-foot tower— the tallest allowed by the Federal Aviation Administration — will eventually serve as the global headquarters for Citadel, which relocated from Chicago to Miami in 2022. The building, at 1201 Brickell Bay Drive, will also have a luxury hotel on top.

Citadel’s headquarters will rise on a 2.5 acre lot along the waterfront in Miami’s financial district that Griffin purchased in 2022 for a record $363 million.

He had initially hired Chicago developer Sterling Bay to build the tower, but cut ties with the builder last year. A new developer for the office plan has not yet been selected, the Journal reported this week.

It was only a week ago that Mercedes-Benz unveiled plans for a condo tower in Miami branded in its name. It was the fourth condo project in Miami that decided to model itself after a luxury car.

Well here comes number five:

Italian automaker Pagani announced this week that it, too, shall have a condo project. The 28-story Pagani Residences will be located in North Bay Village, an island between Miami and Miami Beach. Developed by Miami builder Riviera Horizons, it will include 70 “all-corner” condo units for which prices start at $2.4 million, according to a press statement.

The automaker is promising “the rush of the ride every time you come home” — because who doesn’t want to feel like they’re driving fast when they walk through the front door?

Anyway, a 240-foot long waterfront boardwalk will run alongside the property, which will also offer private boat slips. Condos range from 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, each with wraparound outdoor terraces.

Penthouses span 6,900 square feet and include up to 4,400 square feet of outdoor living space.

That’s it for today!

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