Miami is a dozen towns that share an airport. People moving here choose by the pictures and then discover that the picture is forty minutes from the school, or from the office, or from anything to walk to. Choose by the life and the picture takes care of itself.
This page goes through the zones in the order a newcomer usually needs them: by work, by school, by water, by walking, and by how often you fly. It sends you to each zone’s own page for the detail. Contact the desk at Miami Dossier for the current position on any building we cover.
Finance moved to Brickell and the towers along the bay, and Brickell is where you live if you want to walk to it. Downtown, Edgewater and the Design District are ten minutes from it and quieter. Miami Beach is across the causeway and the causeway is the whole question: fine at seven in the morning, another matter at half past eight. Coral Gables has its own business district and its own kind of firm, older and quieter, and people who work there tend to live there.
If you work from home, none of this applies, and the water and the school decide instead.
Families with children in school usually settle it this way: choose the school, then live within twenty minutes of it, because the school run in Miami is done by car and the twenty minutes is real. The private schools cluster in Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Pinecrest and the Beach, and each cluster has its own neighborhoods around it. The zone pages say which.
The desk is not a school adviser, and will say so. What it can do is put the buildings near a given school in front of you, and introduce the people who advise on admissions.
The ocean is Miami Beach, Surfside, Bal Harbour and Sunny Isles, and living on it means a condo. The bay is Brickell, Edgewater, Coconut Grove, Key Biscayne and the residential islands, and it is calmer, closer to the city and where most of the houses on the water are. Neither is Coral Gables and Pinecrest, which trade the water for trees, land and quiet, and are where a great many people with children end up.
The oceanfront-or-bayfront question has its own page on this site, because it is the question most people are really asking when they say they want to be on the water.
If you want to walk to dinner, that is South Beach, Brickell, the Design District, Coconut Grove’s centre and the middle of Coral Gables. Everywhere else you drive, and people from cities where they walked underestimate how much that changes a week. If you fly often, Coral Gables, the Grove and Brickell are fifteen to twenty minutes from the airport; the Beach and Sunny Isles are forty on a good day.
Walk to dinner and near the airport, on the water, with the school ten minutes away, does not exist. Choosing which two of the four matter is the whole exercise.
With the zone chosen, the desk at Miami Dossier puts the new buildings in it in front of you with the current position on each, and says plainly which fit and which do not. The zones are laid out one by one on this site with what is being built in each; read the two or three that survived the questions above, and the building conversation is short.
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 patterns described are what the desk sees, not rules. 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.
