Seventeen Gables

The rate is knowable exactly and we read it at the folio. Total 19.9544 mills: county at 5.2489, city at 7.1080, city debt at 0.2536, school board at 6.6230, children's trust at 0.4638, and four water and navigation levies totalling about 0.257. For the homestead arithmetic that splits into 13.3314 non-school mills and 6.6230 school mills.

The extra downtown levy does not reach here, and we proved it rather than assumed it. The city levies an additional downtown development district line inside Downtown and Brickell. This parcel returns nothing against the published boundary while the Brickell control returns a hit. Nor does any other special district: we tested for them and every one came back absent with a control behind it.

On non-ad-valorem the answer is a clean zero. A City of Miami condominium unit pays $0.00 in non-ad-valorem assessments, which we proved four separate ways. No solid waste charge, no fire charge, no lighting district, no stormwater line. That is the single biggest structural difference between owning a condominium unit here and owning a house almost anywhere else in this county, where the equivalent charges run into the hundreds.

The full annual figure, on a defensible comparable. At the median recently completed comparable unit value of about $616,606, the bill is about $12,304.00 without homestead and about $11,471.86 with it. The effective rate is about 1.9954 per cent of market value. Homestead saves about $832.15, which is 6.76 per cent of the bill.

That 6.76 per cent is worth noticing because it is far better than the equivalent figure in the luxury towers. The homestead exemption is a flat dollar amount, so its value as a share of the bill falls as the unit gets more expensive. At a $616,606 unit it is worth 6.76 per cent. On a $1,226,000 Edgewater unit the same exemption is worth about 3.48 per cent. This is a price point where the exemption still does real work, which is an argument for buying here to live rather than to hold.

One arithmetic warning, because almost every online estimator gets it wrong. The second homestead exemption does not reach school levies. Applying a flat fifty thousand to every levy overstates the saving and understates the bill. We verified the correct treatment against the roll itself rather than asserting it: every homesteaded unit in the comparable building carries a larger county exemption and exactly twenty-five thousand of school exemption.

And a caution about what this page cannot price. No association dues figure exists in any public record for this building, or for any Florida condominium before its declaration records, and there is no public record of reserves or special assessments at any stage. On a building at this price point the association line will very likely exceed the tax line. We will not publish a number we cannot source, and you should not accept one from a sales office without the budget behind it.

The practical version: the tax side of this purchase is clean, predictable and about a thousand dollars a year worse than the address the brand implies. The association side is unknowable from the outside and is the larger number. Get the budget and the reserve schedule in writing and read them before your rescission period closes.

The hazard record here is about as benign as a Miami address gets. The parcel is in flood zone X, minimal hazard, with no base flood elevation and no special flood hazard area designation. The evacuation zone is E, the lowest category in the county, and the parcel is not in the coastal high hazard area. The Brickell control we ran the same day returns surge inundation bands where this one returns none.

The three measurement methods do something interesting here. Measured by the centre of the parcel it is minimal hazard. Measured by any overlap at all it is minimal hazard plus a sliver of the 0.2 per cent annual chance band. That is not a contradiction, it is a boundary clipping the edge of the site, and it is worth an elevation certificate on the specific unit stack rather than an argument.

The postcode record separates wind from water very cleanly. This postcode has recorded about 9,278 federal assistance registrations and about 65 federal flood insurance claims across the entire history of the programme. About 99.6 per cent of those registrations record no flood damage at all. Total flood claims paid here come to about $545,448, against about $7.6 million in Brickell and about $61.8 million in Coconut Grove. The peak loss year was 2000, a rain event, not 2017.

Read that as the practical instruction it is. The damage mechanism at this address is wind, not water, and the flood programme has barely touched it. Price flood cover on its own merits since you will not be required to carry it, and spend your attention on opening protection, the mitigation credit and the code generation the building is sealed to. Design wind speed is a countywide constant of 175 miles per hour in the high velocity hurricane zone, so the variable is the code year, and a building finished at the end of this decade sits at the current one.

On schools, the brand is telling the truth even though the geography is not. All three assigned schools for this address are Coral Gables schools: the preparatory academy for pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, a Coral Gables middle school, and Coral Gables Senior High. School boundaries and city limits are drawn by different bodies for different reasons and they do not have to agree. Here the disagreement runs in your favour. Confirm it with the district, because the published boundary layers we read were last modified several years ago.

Ownership in the nearest completed comparable tells you what you would be buying into. Of 227 units in the 2019 comparable building, about 23.79 per cent carry homestead and about 40.09 per cent are owned by entities rather than individuals. Against a single-family control run the same day at 85.80 per cent homesteaded and 1.7 per cent entity-owned, that is a different animal, but it is far more owner-occupied than the waterfront towers, where homestead runs in the single digits.

One number there deserves care, because it is the sort of thing that gets repeated wrongly. The apparent foreign-ownership share in that comparable is about 5.29 per cent, but it is a single Bahamian entity holding ten units. Counted by distinct owner rather than by unit it is about 1.32 per cent. Entity ownership and foreign ownership are not the same thing, and a mailing address is a weak proxy for either. Anyone quoting you a foreign-buyer percentage for a Miami building without saying how they counted is guessing.