Miami's Condo Price Record in 2026: $86 Million, and $5,358 a Foot

Miami's condominium price record is the single most quoted number in South Florida real estate, and it is almost always quoted wrong. The record is $86 million. The record is also $5,358 per square foot, which is less per square foot than the sale it replaced. Both facts come from the same deed. Only one of them travels. For anyone working through our Miami pre-construction buyer's guide, the gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing a record sale will ever teach you about pricing a unit.

What the $86 Million Sale Actually Covered

In November 2025 a Fort Partners affiliate, SCR Residences LLC, sold unit PH-11 at 9149 Collins Avenue in Surfside to a Delaware entity for $86 million, making it the most expensive condominium ever sold in Miami-Dade County, The Real Deal reported. The building is Seaway at the Surf Club, an 11-story, two-building, 34-unit project Fort Partners completed in 2024 next door to the Surf Club itself.

The penthouse spans 16,053 square feet. That is the number doing the work. At 16,053 square feet, $86 million is $5,358 per square foot. The same building has produced a string of eight-figure deeds since closings began: an entity linked to a health care executive paid a combined $31.1 million for two units in December 2024, and a Blackstone private equity executive paid $24.5 million for one, per The Real Deal. None of them approached PH-11, because none of them were anywhere near its size.

That is worth separating from the project's sell-through story, which we covered when Seaway North sold out in Surfside. A sellout measures demand across a whole building. A record deed measures one floor plate that cannot be reproduced.

The Record Rose 95 Percent. The Price Per Foot Fell 11 Percent.

The record PH-11 beat was $44 million, paid in April 2024 for PH4 in the north building of Four Seasons Residences at the Surf Club, the Fort Partners condominium directly adjacent. An entity linked to Apple was the seller. That penthouse spans 7,300 square feet, which works out to roughly $6,027 per square foot, The Real Deal reported at the time. It had last traded at $29.1 million in 2018.

Run those side by side and the headline inverts. In dollars the county record rose about 95 percent in 19 months. In price per square foot it fell about 11 percent. The buyer of PH-11 paid the biggest cheque in county history and still paid less for each foot than the buyer who held the record before them.

Prices and sizes above are drawn from The Real Deal's reporting on each transaction. Per-square-foot figures for the 2018 and 2024 trades are calculated from those reported prices and the 7,300-square-foot interior size.

The $120 Million Contract That Still Has No Deed

There is one reported number that would break the per-foot ceiling, and it is not a sale. In March 2024 The Real Deal reported that a penthouse at the Shore Club Private Collection, the Auberge-branded 49-unit project Witkoff Group and Monroe Capital are building at 1901 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach, had gone under contract for more than $120 million. The unit is about 10,500 square feet with another 7,500 square feet of terraces and a rooftop pool, which puts the contract above $11,000 per square foot.

That deal has not closed, because a pre-construction penthouse closes when the building is finished. More than two and a half years after it was reported, the county's record remains the Surfside deed. This is the structural point buyers keep missing:

• A recorded deed is a completed transfer with documentary stamp tax paid against the price. It is public, dated and checkable by anyone.
• A reported contract is a signed intention. It can be renegotiated, assigned, terminated or quietly repriced before closing, and the public record shows nothing until it closes.
• Pre-construction contracts at this level routinely sit for years between signing and deed, which means a "record" can be announced long before it is a fact.
• Press figures for contracts often come from the sales side, not from a filing, so there is no document to check the number against.

Nothing here says the Shore Club deal is soft. It says it is unrecorded, which is a different thing, and the distinction is exactly what separates a verifiable comparable from a headline. The same discipline applies further down the market, which is why our read on Miami-Dade's $10 million-plus sales pace counts recorded sales rather than announced ones.

What I Tell Buyers Reading Record Headlines

My advice on record sales is to treat them as a measurement of one floor plate, never as a market index. When a client sends me a record headline and asks whether Miami prices just went up, the first thing I do is divide the price by the square footage, because that single division usually reverses the story. In this case it does. The buyer who set the county record paid less per foot than the buyer they displaced, and the reason is that they bought more than twice the floor area.

The second thing I check is whether a deed exists. I have watched buyers anchor an offer to a number that had never been recorded anywhere, and the seller on the other side had no obligation to honor a comparable that was only ever a press release. If you cannot pull the deed and read the documentary stamps, it is not a comparable. In Miami-Dade the stamp rate is 60 cents per $100 of consideration, so the tax on a recorded deed independently confirms the price.

The third thing I tell people, especially buyers coming from abroad, is that an ultra-trophy record tells you almost nothing about the floor they are actually shopping. Two penthouses on the same stretch of Collins Avenue traded 19 months apart at per-foot prices 11 percent apart. The ceiling moved sideways while the headline exploded. A unit six floors down in the same building is governed by view, line, exposure and carrying costs, not by what the top floor fetched. Our true cost of owning guide covers the part of the math that actually follows you after closing.

"Divide the price by the square footage before you react to a record. Most of the time the division tells the opposite story from the headline, and the division is the part you can check."

Miami's condominium record will almost certainly be broken, probably at Shore Club, probably at a per-foot number that genuinely does reset the ceiling. When it happens, the useful response is the same as it is today: find the deed, read the stamps, divide by the footage, and ask whether any of it applies to the unit in front of you. Until that deed is recorded, the real record in Miami-Dade is $86 million at $5,358 a foot, and the part of that sentence worth remembering is the second half. For the wider trophy market, we track the pattern in Miami's $20 million-plus condo tier.

Gerardo Gonzalez

Luxury Dade Group at Compass