🏗️ Tower to the People

Happy Saturday Highest & Best! We’re hitting all the real estate bases today —apartments, condos AND warehouses. Here’s the rundown:

📈 Miami rockets to #1 in new apartment approvals

🌍 Foreign buyers claim nearly half of South Florida’s new condos

🥊 Don King dodges foreclosure, lands a profit

💰 Why investors are betting big on old Miami warehouses

Let’s get to it!

📈 Permit to Brag: Miami’s Apartment Boom Is Back

Looks like Miami still has a thing for apartment towers.

The greater Miami area has been awash in new apartments as developers delivered a record 24,000 new rentals in 2024, with another 16,000 on the way this year 🏗️.

Builders paused long enough to catch their breath. But now they’re flooring it again.

🚀 In June, Miami leapt to #1 in the nation for new multifamily permits, adding plans for nearly 2,500 units in a single month, RealPage reported. That’s 1,500 more than May’s total and enough to knock Brooklyn and Austin, TX down a peg in their annual rankings of new apartment activity.

What’s fueling the Miami multifamily comeback? 🤔 Maybe developers are seeing what everyone else is: that even after tens of thousands of new units came to market, Miami somehow remains the hottest rental scene in the country.🔥

📦 The rental story just isn’t cooling off, according to a RentCafe study:

• Apartments in Miami are filling in just 36 days, the fastest in the country.

• Each vacant unit draws 21 renters — more than twice the U.S. average.

• 74.7% of renters renewed their leases.

• The occupancy rate is at 96.6%, second only to Brooklyn

Here’s the chart from RealPage on Miami’s leap to number one in the U.S for new multifamily permits:

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• Out of Office?, July 25, 2025

• A Loan at the Top, July 20, 2025

• Another One Buys the Dust, July 6, 2025

💰Foreign Buyers Claim Nearly Half of South Florida’s New Condos

When it comes to sales of South Florida’s newly built and under-construction condos, nearly half of buyers needed a passport to get to the closing table.

A report from the Miami Association of Realtors found that international buyers accounted for 49% of new-construction condo sales over the past 18 months. That’s 2,688 units across 37 developments since December 2023.

The global presence was even more pronounced in certain neighborhoods:

• 🌎 Brickell: 60% of new condo sales went to international buyers, many snapping up compact units designed to be leased out as short-term rentals.

• 🏖️ Miami Beach: 71% of new condo sales were to foreign nationals.

• ✈️ Southeast Broward: A whopping 83% of new condo buyers came from abroad.

It wasn’t exactly a global free-for-all. Latin American buyers accounted for the lion’s share of international demand: 86% of it, the report said.

🔭 Zooming out, Florida remains the top destination for international buyers, pulling in 21% of all foreign real estate purchases nationwide, according to a separate report by the National Association of Realtors.

🥊 Don King Dodges Foreclosure, Might Even Pocket a Profit

Boxing promoter Don King not only avoided a foreclosure sale on his delinquent Deerfield Beach warehouse—he may have walked away with a profit.

King sold the 46,467-square-foot office and industrial building last week for $11 million, more than double the amount he owed on a defaulted $5.1 million mortgage, according to court records flagged by Vizzda.

The property, at 501 Fairway Drive, which faced a court-ordered sale, ended up being purchased by an affiliate of the Boca Raton construction firm Straticon.

King bought the site in 2000 for $3 million. The 1985-era two-story building was long home to Don King Productions, the company behind some of boxing’s most famous fights.

The March foreclosure suit, filed by lender Blueprint Capital, alleged King had stopped making payments on his loan last year. The lender dismissed the case on July 18, just before the property sale closed.

King, 93 and living in Boca Raton, is also trying to sell a 52-acre former jai-alai site in Mangonia Park for about $104 million. That property is currently tied up in a separate $38 million foreclosure case.🤷‍♀️

📦 Investors Still Love a Good Old Miami Warehouse

Turns out, Don King isn’t the only one seeing value in aging industrial buildings.

Just as King was offloading his vintage Deerfield Beach warehouse, investment firm Longpoint shelled out $82 million for a six-building industrial complex in Doral — which includes some buildings old enough to remember disco 🕺.

Boston-based Longpoint acquired the 300,000-square-foot complex from Terreno Realty, $TRNO ( ▲ 3.9% ) , which paid just $23.7 million for it in 2013, Terreno said in a press release. The property, named “America’s Gateway Park” (perhaps for its proximity to Miami’s airport and the Florida Turnpike) got a $4 million refresh, and is now 91% leased.

The sale reflects a current dynamic in Miami’s warehouse market: older warehouses are outperforming the shinier new ones 💎. According to brokerage Avison Young, vacancy rates for Class B and C industrial buildings (read: older and less flashy) dipped below 5% in Q2 📉. Meanwhile, sleek Class A warehouses are grappling with 13% vacancy—more than triple 2022 levels—as a wave of new construction has outpaced tenant demand 😬.

🏗 What drove the warehouse construction boom? South Florida’s population surge and demand for speedy delivery 🚚 made warehouse space near urban centers a hot commodity🔥. Between 2021 and 2022, a record 7 million square feet of new industrial space hit the market in just the Miami area, Avison Young reports. That pipeline has since cooled to about 2 million square feet, but older buildings, it seems, are now punching above their weight.

That’s it for today!

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