A South Florida condominium project has a legal starting line that almost nobody outside the business ever sees. Under section 718.502 of the Florida Statutes, a developer must file the documents required by sections 718.503 and 718.504 with the state’s Division of Florida Condominiums, Timeshares and Mobile Homes before a contract to buy a unit becomes enforceable against the purchaser. Until that filing is done, the buyer can void the contract at any point before closing. There is no billboard attached to the filing, no press release and no hoarding on the site. It is a paperwork event, and often the only thing that has happened.
Between a project’s earliest stages and its broader public launch, there can be a window in which opportunities are shared through developer relationships and private networks rather than broadly marketed to the public. Eric McNeil’s work alongside luxury developers in the Miami to Palm Beach corridor often focuses on these developer-direct and off-market opportunities. Most accounts of it are written from the buyer’s chair. The sponsor’s side is the more interesting one, because a developer who keeps a release quiet is choosing, for a period, to sell to fewer people than he could.
The launch is the expensive part
Going public with a tower is not a switch that gets flipped. It is a capital programme that runs well ahead of revenue.
Renderings, a physical model, a furnished model residence, a brand identity and a sales gallery all get paid for before a single contract is signed. Bisnow has reported Miami condominium developers spending between five and eight million dollars on a sales gallery alone, with one sponsor building a centre of roughly 22,000 square feet, and galleries taken on leases of two to five years so that they last the whole sales run. A gallery of that kind is a set built to sell a building that does not exist, and it has to hold the attention of brokers with four other openings to show that season…