Smart Brickell III

The headline here is a boundary, and it runs the buyer's way for once. Downtown and Brickell normally sit inside a downtown development district that levies an extra 0.3800 mills. These parcels are about 800 to 1,100 feet west of the published boundary and return no hits against it, while a downtown control returns one. We confirmed it a third way by subtracting two per-folio tax totals, which produces exactly 0.3800.

So the rate is the plain city rate. Total 19.9544 mills rather than 20.3344: 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. On the median unit that boundary is worth about $149 a year, which is small but it is the kind of thing nobody checks and everybody assumes the wrong way round.

The non-ad-valorem line is zero and we did not take it on trust. A City of Miami condominium unit here pays $0.00 in non-ad-valorem assessments, confirmed against two controls that do carry charges. That matters more than usual on this page because two of our other Miami pages turned up non-zero lines where the county-wide rule said there would be none, so the zero is worth proving each time rather than assuming.

Now the full annual figure, which is the lowest on any Miami page we have built. On the median unit value in the completed first phase, about $391,810, the bill is about $7,818.33 without homestead and about $6,967.38 with it. That is a genuinely accessible price point for Brickell, and it is the reason this scheme exists.

At that value the homestead exemption finally does real work. About $850.96 of saving on a bill of about $7,818 is 10.88 per cent, against 3.48 per cent on an Edgewater tower unit and 1.77 per cent on a barrier-island unit. The exemption is a flat dollar amount, so the cheaper the unit the more it matters. If you intend to actually live in the unit, this is the price band where that decision pays.

The usual arithmetic warning applies and it is worth repeating. The second homestead exemption does not reach school levies. Applying a flat fifty thousand to every levy overstates the saving by about $146.76. We verify that against the roll's own exemption fields on every page rather than asserting it.

One valuation oddity from the first phase that will confuse anyone reading comparables. In the same building, on the same closing day, the lodging units now assess at about 0.845 times their purchase price while the residential units assess at about 1.174 times. Same structure, same date, a forty per cent spread in how the market and the assessor have treated the two products since. If somebody quotes you a price per square foot for this building, ask which condominium they took it from.

And one commercial figure worth deflating. The commercial condominium's reported sellout of about $53.4 million appears on the roll at about $4.8 million, with all twenty-five units conveyed on one day and every one flagged as between affiliated parties. The defensible residential and lodging sellout for that tower is about $43.1 million across a hundred units. Treat any aggregate sellout number in this scheme as marketing until you have seen the deeds behind it.

The practical version: the tax on this address is low by Miami standards, computable to the dollar, and slightly better than a buyer would guess because of the district boundary. The association side is unknowable from outside and, in a building with a privately held podium and three separate associations, is the part that deserves all of your attention.

The hazard picture here is mixed in an instructive way. The parcels are in flood zone X with no base flood elevation, on an effective panel dated 2009, and they are not in the coastal high hazard area, carry no coastal A or wave action designation, and take no surge at any category. On flood, this is a good address.

But it does carry an evacuation zone, and that is the nuance. This site is in hurricane evacuation zone B, a category two zone, where the Wynwood tower we studied a mile and a half north carries no evacuation zone at all. Evacuation zones and flood zones answer different questions. One asks whether water reaches the building in a storm, the other whether the area should empty out ahead of one. A building can be clean on the first and still be ordered out on the second.

The postcode claim record splits wind from water cleanly. This postcode has 178 federal flood insurance claims and about $2.80 million paid, of which 123 were rated in the mandated hazard zone and only ten outside it. Against that, 6,824 federal assistance registrations and about $2.55 million paid, of which only about $55,468 was attributed to flood at all. About 91 per cent of those registrations came from renters and about 98.7 per cent carried no flood insurance.

Read that as an instruction. The flood losses here are concentrated in the mandated zone, which this parcel is not in, and the household damage is overwhelmingly wind. Design wind speed is a countywide constant of 175 miles per hour in the high velocity hurricane zone, so the variable that matters is the code generation, and this phase is being built to a newer one than the finished tower next door.

On schools the assignment is clear with one caveat worth naming. All three sites assign to a preparatory elementary covering pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, and to Booker T. Washington Senior High in Overtown. The county's own elementary and middle boundary layers disagree with each other for grades six to eight. That is a genuine conflict in the published data, so confirm the middle-school assignment with the district rather than with either layer.

Ownership in the finished phase is the number that decides whether this is for you. Of 125 unit folios, zero carry a homestead exemption. Between 84 and 86 per cent are held by limited liability companies. Two other Brickell buildings we ran as controls the same day came back at 15.6 per cent and 24.8 per cent homesteaded. Part of the zero is structural, since the fifty lodging units legally cannot be homesteaded. The rest is not.

Be clear-eyed about what that means rather than alarmed by it. This is a short-stay and investor product wearing a residential label, and the building will be run by people optimising yield rather than by people living there. For an investor that is the whole appeal, and the price point and the ten-plus per cent homestead value make the resident case real too. But if you are buying to live in it, walk the finished tower at ten on a weekday night before you decide, and read the rental provisions in the declaration first.