South Florida does not have a housing market so much as a developer ecosystem. A few dozen firms decide what the skyline becomes, and once you learn their names you start seeing fingerprints everywhere. The blue glass curve on Brickell. The tower in Sunny Isles where cars ride elevators to the sky. The supertall climbing over Downtown. Every one of them traces back to a developer with a distinct appetite for risk, a distinct relationship with city hall, and a distinct bet on who moves to Florida next.
This page is organized the way locals actually talk about new development: by market. The company remaking West Palm Beach has almost nothing in common with the one stacking towers on Sunny Isles sand, and the approvals game in Miami Beach looks nothing like the one in Brickell. We link to the towers as we go, including icons like the Porsche Design Tower and its patented automobile elevator, the Waldorf Astoria supertall redefining the Downtown skyline, and Bugatti Residences carrying French automotive craft into Brickell.
First, a clarification that confuses even industry people. Related Group, the Miami condo giant run by Jorge Perez, is not the same company as Related Companies, the New York powerhouse run by Stephen Ross. Both are now building in South Florida. Only one of them is rebuilding an entire downtown.
Stephen Ross fell for West Palm Beach years ago and never really left. Through Related Companies he has spent the better part of a decade turning the city into what the financial press now calls Wall Street South. The Square, the open air district that replaced the old CityPlace mall, anchors the play. Around it sit office towers like 360 Rosemary and One Flagler, built for the finance firms that relocated from Manhattan and wanted glass, daylight, and a short walk to lunch. Residential followed the jobs: The Laurel and its neighbors give the bankers somewhere to live within a few blocks of their desks.
The strategy here is different from Miami condo development. In West Palm Beach, Related Companies is building a complete downtown ecosystem, office first and residential second, which is the reverse of the usual Florida formula. The bet is that the migration of wealth and firms is permanent, and that the executives want new construction within walking distance of everything. So far the leasing numbers suggest the bet is right. Expect the pipeline here to stay office heavy, with residential phases timed to each new wave of corporate relocations.
No market in Florida concentrates this much developer firepower in this few square miles. Brickell and Downtown are where balance sheets get tested, because land costs force height, height forces engineering, and engineering forces a level of capitalization that eliminates most firms before they start.
Jorge Perez built more condominiums in South Florida than any developer in history, and Brickell is his home field. Icon Brickell, the three tower complex with its famous rooftop pool, defined the neighborhood in 2008. SLS Brickell and SLS Lux followed, bringing hotel branded living to the financial district. Now the firm is back with Baccarat Residences, a roughly 75 story tower rising on the river, betting that Brickell buyers want quiet luxury instead of another glass box. Related does not chase trends. It sets the price per square foot that everyone else underwrites against.
Property Markets Group, the New York based firm led by Kevin Maloney, arrived in Miami with a taste for complicated deals and left with the most ambitious tower in Florida. The Waldorf Astoria Miami, a 100 story supertall around 1,049 feet, is under construction in Downtown and will become the tallest residential building south of New York when it delivers. PMG also built the E11EVEN Hotel and Residences and E11EVEN Residences Beyond with E11EVEN Partners, plus The Elser, proving it can work both the ultra luxury and the high volume ends of Downtown. Nobody in this market entitles difficult sites the way PMG does.
Vladislav Doronin, the Russian born developer behind the Aman resorts, brought a hotelier obsession with detail to Miami. Una Residences, on the Brickell waterfront, is under construction with private elevator entries and a bayfront setting that sold out its early releases fast. 830 Brickell, the office tower, delivered as the first new office building on Brickell in over a decade and leased to finance tenants at rents the market had never seen. OKO builds slowly and expensively, and the product shows it.
Ugo Colombo has been building in Brickell since before it was fashionable, which in Miami means since the 1990s. Brickell Flatiron, his 64 story tower, held the title of tallest residential building south of New York at delivery and still anchors the southern end of Brickell Avenue. Epic, his earlier hotel condo hybrid on the river, proved the concept that Brickell could support true luxury pricing. Colombo is old school Miami development: buy well, build well, hold the unsold inventory without panic.
Okan Tower, a 70 story mixed use tower with a Hilton hotel and residences, is under construction in Downtown Miami, the kind of vertical mixed use project that only pencils when hotel, condo, and office demand all hit at once. Nearby, Royal Palm Companies delivered Paramount Miami Worldcenter, the amenity loaded tower inside the Miami Worldcenter master development, with a sports simulator deck and resort scale common areas that reset buyer expectations for the whole district. The master developer behind that 27 acre site, Miami Worldcenter Associates led by Art Falcone and Nitin Motwani, spent over a decade assembling and entitling the land, which tells you everything about the time horizons in Downtown development.
Edgewater does not get the magazine covers, but it quietly absorbs thousands of new residents per cycle. The formula is simple: bay views, lower prices than Brickell, and a straight shot down Biscayne Boulevard to everything. Developers love it because the entitlement path is cleaner than Miami Beach and the buyer pool is deep.
Related Group built the Paraiso district here, four towers sharing bayfront amenities, and proved that Edgewater buyers would pay for a genuine resort setting rather than just a view. Two Roads Development delivered Elysee, the 57 story tower with only 100 residences, betting that Edgewater had an ultra luxury buyer hiding inside a mid market neighborhood. The bet worked. OKO Group chose Edgewater for Missoni Baia, its fashion branded bayfront tower, and Melo Group, the Argentine family firm that builds at a pace nobody else matches, delivered Aria on the Bay with its distinctive elliptical shape. Edgewater rewards developers who understand that the buyer here is value conscious but not cheap, and punishes anyone who phones in the amenities.
Every other market on this page rewards height. Coral Gables punishes it. The city runs one of the strictest design review processes in Florida, with a Mediterranean architectural code rooted in George Merrick’s 1920s vision, and it enforces that code through boards that can keep a project in redesign for years. National developers circle the Gables constantly. Few survive the process unchanged.
What gets built here tends to come from boutique firms willing to design to the code rather than fight it: low rise luxury, interior courtyards, tile roofs, and parking hidden behind facades that could pass for 1926. Cassia Residences, the newest luxury offering in the Gables, follows exactly this playbook. The lesson for buyers is that scarcity is the product. Nothing tall is coming, which means nothing new will ever dilute the value of what exists. Developers who want volume go elsewhere. Developers who want the highest price per square foot per story in Miami Dade learn to love the review board.
Miami Beach is where developers go to make statements, because the land costs and the review boards eliminate anyone with a thin concept. What survives here tends to become the postcard.
David Martin’s Terra Group owns the modern luxury conversation on Miami Beach. Eighty Seven Park, designed by Renzo Piano and delivered in 2019, set a new bar for restraint on the sand: light, glass, and a private park doing the visual heavy lifting instead of the building. Five Park followed with the city’s tallest tower and a three acre public park at its base, a reminder that in Miami Beach the public realm negotiation is part of the architecture. Terra also built its reputation in Coconut Grove with Grove at Grand Bay and Park Grove, and its upcoming THE WELL project there shows a developer thinking in decades rather than cycles.
Michael Stern’s JDS built Monad Terrace on the South Beach waterfront, the honeycomb facade tower that looks like nothing else on Collins Avenue, and proved that a New York developer could read the Miami Beach market correctly on the first try. JDS works at the intersection of engineering ambition and design risk, which is why its projects photograph the way they do.
Not every Miami Beach developer builds new. SHVO took on The Raleigh, the 1940s Art Deco hotel, for a meticulous restoration aimed at returning it to the top of the South Beach hierarchy. Mast Capital partnered with Starwood Capital on The Perigon, the ultra luxury oceanfront condominium rising with only 82 residences, betting that scarcity plus location beats scale every time on the beach. Ian Bruce Eichner’s Continuum Company built the Continuum towers in the early 2000s and proved that South Beach would support true oceanfront luxury pricing. Alan Faena created the Faena District around Collins Avenue, part development and part cultural project, and showed that a developer with a point of view could move the center of gravity of an entire neighborhood.
Two miles of beach, one road, and the highest concentration of branded luxury towers in the Western Hemisphere. Sunny Isles works because the buyer is global, the product is unapologetic, and the developers here understand theater better than anyone in the business.
Gil Dezer turned Sunny Isles into his personal showcase. The Porsche Design Tower, delivered in 2016, put the city on the world map with its patented automobile elevator system that carries cars directly into sky residences. The tower remains the reference point for every car obsessed development that followed. Armani/Casa Residences brought Italian fashion house branding to the sand in 2019. Now Bentley Residences is under construction, aiming to become the tallest residential tower on an American beachfront at around 749 feet, with each residence getting a multi car garage in the sky. Dezer does not build condos. It builds machines for living that happen to have bedrooms.
Edgardo Defortuna’s Fortune International practically invented the Sunny Isles luxury market. Jade Beach, Jade Ocean, and Jade Signature, the last designed by Herzog and de Meuron and delivered in 2018, form a trilogy that taught the world what a Miami beach tower could be. Fortune also develops, markets, and sells for other firms, which means its fingerprints are on far more towers than its own portfolio suggests. When a foreign buyer thinks of Miami luxury, they are usually thinking of a Fortune project.
The Trump Group of Eddie and Jules Trump, unrelated to the Trump Organization, built the Estates at Acqualina, the twin tower oceanfront development that reset Sunny Isles pricing when it delivered in 2022. The distinction matters locally: this is a South Florida development family with decades on the sand, not a licensing deal. Their projects trade on old school luxury signifiers, service, scale, and unobstructed water, executed without irony.
Aventura is the only market in South Florida where a shopping mall functions as the downtown. Turnberry, the developer behind Aventura Mall, one of the highest grossing malls in America, built Turnberry Ocean Club on the ocean a short drive east, and the synergy is the point: residents get a private beach club plus the retail and dining gravity of the mall. New development in Aventura tends to be infill around this core, mid rise to high rise, aimed at buyers who want the Aventura school district and the mall lifestyle without the Miami Beach price tag. Developers here underwrite to a local buyer first and a foreign buyer second, which makes Aventura one of the more stable presale markets in the region.
Fort Lauderdale spent decades as the place Miami people moved to for space. Then the towers started, and the pitch flipped: downtown Fort Lauderdale now offers new construction at a discount to Brickell with a Brightline station that puts Miami 30 minutes away. Developers noticed.
Kolter Urban built 100 Las Olas, the 46 story tower that became the tallest in Fort Lauderdale when it delivered in 2020, and followed with Selene Oceanfront Residences on the sand. PMG brought its Society concept to Las Olas with Society Las Olas, betting that the rental and condo demand from young professionals was underserved. The Fort Lauderdale buyer is often a Miami buyer doing math: same new building quality, lower price per foot, and a downtown that finally has enough restaurants to keep them there on weekends. The development pipeline here is the deepest it has ever been, and the developers leading it are the same names that proved the concept in Miami a decade earlier.
Navigating South Florida’s permit maze is a skill that separates the developers who deliver from the ones who stall. We have covered the full process in our South Florida Building Permits and Expediting Guide, from what permits a tower needs to how long each takes to how you can check a project’s permit status before you buy.
The current pipeline tells you where South Florida development is heading, and the direction is up, inland from the beach, and clustered around transit.
Brickell is becoming a genuine supertall district. The Waldorf Astoria Miami leads, but it will have company: Ytech’s 1428 Brickell, a roughly 70 story luxury tower, is moving through the pipeline, and Ken Griffin’s Citadel has proposed a headquarters tower that would plant a flag for finance at a scale Brickell has never seen. The Brickell of 2030 will read as a continuous wall of towers from the river to the bay, which was the plan all along.
Downtown’s second act is Miami Worldcenter, where the first phase proved the concept and the coming phases will fill in the blocks around it with residential, hotel, and retail. The developers who bought into the Worldcenter early are now sitting on the best positioned land in the urban core.
Wynwood is the market to watch for the next residential wave. The arts district built its brand on warehouses and murals, but the zoning now supports serious density, and developers have started testing luxury product north of the traditional condo corridors. If Wynwood follows the pattern of every other Miami neighborhood, the first luxury tower resets pricing and the rest follow within a cycle.
Little River and Little Haiti sit further out on the risk curve: industrial buildings, early gallery and restaurant openings, and land prices that still allow mid rise wood frame or podium construction. This is where the developers who missed Brickell go to build the next thing.
West Palm Beach keeps compounding. Related Companies shows no sign of slowing its downtown buildout, and every new office lease announcement pulls more residential demand behind it. Fort Lauderdale’s downtown pipeline, led by the same developers who proved Miami a decade ago, keeps absorbing buyers priced out of Brickell. And the Brightline corridor continues to quietly reprice every downtown it touches, because a 30 minute train ride turns three separate markets into one labor and buyer pool.
The through line: South Florida is still early in its vertical growth. The developers on this page are not finishing the skyline. They are building the first draft of it.
Related Group, led by Jorge Perez, has delivered more condominium units in South Florida than any other developer. Its portfolio spans four decades and includes defining projects in Brickell, Edgewater, and South Beach.
The ultra luxury tier belongs to a short list: Dezer Development with Porsche Design Tower and Bentley Residences in Sunny Isles, OKO Group with Una Residences on the Brickell waterfront, and PMG with the Waldorf Astoria Miami supertall. These are the projects setting price per square foot records.
A straightforward project can move from site plan to building permit in 12 to 18 months. Complex sites, supertalls, or anything in Miami Beach can take two years or more. Developers use private providers and permit expeditors to compress the timeline, and the fastest firms treat entitlement as a core competency rather than an administrative step.
The Waldorf Astoria Miami, a 100 story tower in Downtown Miami rising to roughly 1,049 feet. When it delivers it will be the tallest residential building south of New York.
Preconstruction buyers trade certainty for pricing: you lock today’s price and wait several years for delivery. The developers on this page with long delivery track records, Related, Terra, Dezer, and Kolter among them, are where conservative buyers tend to land. As with any purchase this size, the developer’s history of actually delivering matters more than the rendering.
By unit count, Brickell and Downtown Miami lead, followed by Edgewater and Sunny Isles. By price per square foot, Sunny Isles and Miami Beach set the pace. West Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale are growing fastest in percentage terms as corporate relocations keep feeding demand.
