People arrive in Miami wanting a house because they had a house. A year later many of them own a condo, and the ones who kept looking for the house often bought one in a neighborhood they would not have chosen if they had understood the trade at the start.
This page sets out the trade honestly: what a house gives you in Miami and what it asks of you, what a condo gives you and what it asks, and the questions that usually decide it. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
A house in Miami gives you what a house gives you anywhere: your own walls, a garden, a pool that is yours, a garage, and no association telling you what colour the door can be. In Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Pinecrest and the older parts of Miami Beach it also gives you tree cover, quiet, and the kind of street where children ride bicycles.
It also gives you the roof, the seawall if there is one, the pool pump, the generator, the landscaping, the hurricane shutters and the insurance, all yours to arrange and pay for, and in a climate that is hard on all of them. Owners who live here full time manage it. Owners who are here four months a year manage it badly or pay someone to manage it for them.
A condo in Miami is how you live on the ocean or on the bay, because almost none of the waterfront is houses. It is also how you leave for three months and come back to a home that was watched, maintained and kept dry, which is why so many second home buyers end up in one.
What it asks of you is the association fee, which in a new building covers the staff, the amenities, the building’s insurance and the reserves the law now requires, and the rules, which govern renting, pets, renovations and sometimes how many months a year the place may sit empty. The fee is the number to read before the view.
The honest version: a house is a job you own. A condo is a fee you pay so that the job is someone else’s.
A house carries property tax, insurance that has become the hardest line in a Miami budget, and maintenance that is irregular and large. A condo carries property tax, the association fee, and a smaller insurance policy for the inside of the residence, because the building carries the structure. The totals are often closer than buyers expect once the house’s roof and seawall are counted over ten years rather than one.
In a new building the fee is set by the developer’s first budget and rises when the owners take over the association; the desk reads that budget and says where it usually moves. In a house there is no budget until you write one.
Families with children in school and a full time life here tend to end up in houses, in Coral Gables, the Grove, Pinecrest or the Beach’s residential islands, and they accept the jobs because they are here to do them. Couples, people here part of the year, and anyone whose first requirement is the water tend to end up in condos, and the ones who are candid about how much time they will actually spend here are the happiest with the choice.
The ones who struggle are the buyers who want the house’s privacy and the condo’s water and absence of jobs at the same time. There are a few buildings that come close: large residences with private elevators and their own entries in a building that is run for them. They are the newest buildings on the coast and the desk covers them.
How many months a year will you be here. Do you need the water or want it. Are there children, and where will they be in school. Who will look after the place when you are not in it. Answer those and the house or condo question mostly answers itself, and the desk can put the specific buildings, or the specific streets, in front of you the same day.
This is the desk at Miami Dossier, a real estate desk covering the Miami market. It reads the developer’s documents, keeps the current position on every new building it covers, and puts the buildings that fit a brief in front of you the same day.
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Nothing on this page is legal, tax or investment advice, and the pattern described is what the desk sees, not a rule. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier and we will go through the buildings that fit, the current position on each and what the next step actually is. Where a question is legal, tax or immigration, we introduce you to advisers who handle that properly rather than answering it ourselves.
