Coming soon in Ojus, FL
Canal by IQ
18550 NE 23 Court, unincorporated Miami-Dade County
It is in no city at all, which saves about $1,941 a year against the North Miami Beach address people assume it has. The water is the Oleta River, not a canal, and that changes the flood answer in both directions. The whole record is below.
- Address
- 18550 NE 23 Court
- Municipality
- None
- Units
- 34
- Tax rate
- 16.8983 mills
At a glance
Canal by IQ fast facts
Every figure below is read from the state condominium filing, the county appraiser's own two-year tax tool, the county's bulk permit dataset, the water and sewer allocation record, the federal flood and claim files, or the county's hazard layers with waterfront controls behind each result. Where a number does not exist yet we say so plainly.
- Record address
- 18550 NE 23 Court, FL 33180
- Filed as
- Canal by IQ, a Condominium
- Municipality
- None, unincorporated county
- Size
- 34 units, derived from the sewer record
- Tax rate
- 16.8983 mills
- If it were North Miami Beach
- 21.0007, or about $1,941 more
- Against Aventura
- About three dollars apart
- The water
- The Oleta River, not a canal
- Flood zone
- AE, base flood elevation about 6 feet
- Evacuation zone
- C, two categories later than the beach
- Milestone trigger
- 25 years, the county has elected it
- Homestead saving here
- About $694, or 8.68 percent
- Pricing and release dates
- Not published yet
- Association dues and reserves
- Not a public record at any stage
Not published yet
Not published yet
Location: see 18550 NE 23 Court on the map. Figures carry the dates shown and are subject to change.
Where this actually is
An Aventura postcode, a North Miami Beach reputation, and no city at all
Three different places get attached to this address and none of them is right. The parcel is in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, in the Ojus area. We confirmed that on three independent systems, with controls that correctly return North Miami Beach at an Eastern Shores address and Aventura at the mall. The postcode is Aventura's. The mailing conventions point at North Miami Beach. The jurisdiction is neither.
That is worth a great deal of money in one direction and almost nothing in the other. North Miami Beach runs 21.0007 mills against this address at 16.8983, a difference of about $1,941 a year on the median comparable unit, or 24.3 per cent. Aventura runs 16.7154 plus a $74.10 stormwater charge, which lands about three dollars a year from this address. So the city everyone assumes is the expensive one, and the city nobody mentions is a statistical tie.
There is a second consequence of that North Miami Beach assumption that nobody prices. North Miami Beach sits outside the county library district, which is exactly the 0.2812 mills by which its county line differs from this one. A buyer who thinks they are in that city has the wrong tax rate and the wrong library system. Small, but it is the kind of thing that shows up as a surprise at closing.
The water gets misdescribed too, and this one has real consequences. The county's own waterway layer types this as a river, the recorded legal description calls it the east bank of the Oleta River, and it is maintained by the state rather than a local drainage district. A tidal river carries water inland. A dead-end residential canal does not. That single difference explains why this site behaves better than the beach in a surge and worse against slow sea level rise, which is set out below.
On size, we derived the unit count from a record rather than a brochure. The water and sewer allocation for the site is 4,590 gallons a day, and at the department's own per-unit rate that is exactly 34 units. The site is two folios totalling about 15,770 square feet, bought for about $2,018,000 in late 2022.
On construction, the county's permit data actually works here, which is rare. Unlike the cities, unincorporated addresses appear in a bulk county permit dataset. The master building permit was issued in the spring to a licensed general contractor, and the process number on it matches the one on the sewer allocation form. But read the dates carefully before you accept a timeline.
Because the timeline is ahead of the record. Marketing describes construction as having started in mid-2026. Temporary construction power was permitted eleven days ago, and the inspection, approval and completion fields on every permit are empty. There is no inspection, no approval and no certificate of occupancy. Work is beginning rather than underway, and that gap matters if your deposit schedule is tied to milestones.
Take these four to the sales office: written confirmation that the property is unincorporated and which authorities appear on the bill; whether the sewer district assessment on the land will re-attach to the unit folios after the declaration records, and on what formula; the proposed association budget and reserve schedule; and the construction and turnover timetable against the permit record rather than against the brochure.
What this actually costs
The cheapest jurisdiction of the three, and the first assessment we have found on a condo site
The rate here is the unincorporated county rate and it is the low one. Total 16.8983 mills: the county group at 7.6454, the school board group at 6.6230, the county fire and library districts inside the county line, the children's trust at 0.4638 and the water and navigation levies. There is no municipal levy at all, because there is no municipality.
Against the two cities a buyer would confuse this with, the spread is lopsided. North Miami Beach costs about $1,941.36 a year more on the same unit. Aventura costs about three dollars more, once its stormwater charge is added. Being unincorporated here is priced almost exactly like being in a beach city, and far better than being in the city next door.
Now the correction to something we have published before. We have said on earlier pages that a condominium unit in this county carries no non-ad-valorem assessment. Inside the cities that holds. Outside them it does not: eight of ten unincorporated condominium units we sampled at random carry a lighting, maintenance or solid waste line, ranging from under a dollar to about $702. That is a real difference between city and county condominium ownership and we had it wrong.
This specific site has its own version of that, and the usual tool hides it. The subject land carried about $6,405.42 of non-ad-valorem in 2025 under a sanitary sewer district, a voluntary long-term assessment the developer opted into. It appears only on the two-year tax comparison; the single-year assessment tool reports zero for the current year. If you check this address the obvious way, you will be told there is nothing there.
What we could not settle is whether it follows you. Whether that sewer assessment re-attaches to the 34 unit folios once the declaration records, and on what formula, is not established by any public record. We tested per unit, per gallon and per value against controls and falsified all three. The Ojus area itself is otherwise clean, so a unit here should read zero, but that is a forecast rather than a fact and it is the single most important question to put in writing.
The full annual figure, on a defensible comparable. At the median recently completed unit in this postcode, about $473,224 across 510 unit records built since 2013, the bill is about $7,302.84 without homestead, against about $7,299.79 for the identical unit in Aventura. On the tax line alone, the choice between the two is a rounding error.
And at this price point the exemption is worth having. Homestead saves about $693.84, which is about 8.68 per cent of the bill here, against 4.31 per cent at a Brickell tower. The exemption is a flat dollar amount, so it is regressive against unit value: the cheaper the unit the more it does. At under half a million this is a building where declaring it as your home genuinely changes the number.
The practical version: the tax on this address is the lowest of the three jurisdictions it gets confused with and can be computed to the dollar. The open question is the sewer assessment, which is genuinely unresolved, and the association dues, which are unknowable from outside. Get both answered in writing before your rescission window closes.
The compliance clock
A 25-year building, because the county actually elected the earlier trigger
Since the Surfside collapse Florida has built a hard timetable around structural inspection and reserve funding. On every previous page in this series we had to publish two possible dates, because the statute leaves the earlier coastal trigger to the local building official and no city we looked at had visibly adopted it. Here we can give one answer.
The county has elected it. For unincorporated addresses the county is the building official, and its code adopts the twenty-five-year coastal milestone inspection trigger. This site is about 2.18 miles from the Atlantic, about 0.81 miles from tidal bay water, and about 60 metres from a tidal river. So this is a twenty-five-year building, not a thirty-year one, and its first milestone inspection falls due twenty-five years after its certificate of occupancy.
That is a genuine cost difference and almost nobody prices it. A twenty-five-year first inspection is the same clock the Aventura towers across the water run on, and five years earlier than a building a few miles inland. It does not make the building worse. It does mean the first large structural expense arrives half a decade sooner than a buyer comparing it to an inland condominium would assume.
The reserve study clock runs from a different event. The first structural integrity reserve study is due ten years from the condominium's creation, and this condominium has not been created because the declaration is unrecorded. The recent deadline that has driven special assessments across South Florida binds associations that already existed and were owner-controlled. It does not reach this one.
Here the building's size works in a buyer's favour, which is the reverse of what we found on the small barrier-island filings. At 34 units this association clears the twenty-five-unit threshold that compels it to maintain a website and post its budget, its contracts, its insurance and its inspection reports where owners can read them. The nine-to-eighteen-unit buildings we looked at on Bay Harbor Islands never reach that line and never have to publish anything. Thirty-four units is small enough to be personal and large enough to be transparent.
The turnover finding is the same as everywhere. At turnover the developer must deliver an accountant's audit, two sealed engineering reports and the reserve study, and there is no obligation in that section to fund the reserve at any level or to make good a shortfall. The developer tells the owners what the building will need; the owners pay for it.
And here is what a buyer cannot see before contracting. The record-access right that produces reserve studies and inspection reports runs to unit owners. The estoppel certificate runs to an owner, a mortgagee or their designee. A prospective purchaser is none of those, and on a building with no owners yet there is nobody to ask. The prospectus and condominium documents on a developer sale are the channel that works.
What to demand in writing before your rescission period closes: the proposed budget with its reserve schedule; whether the sewer district assessment attaches to units; the developer's position on funding reserves before turnover; the expected certificate of occupancy and turnover dates against the permit record rather than the brochure; and confirmation that the association will maintain the website the statute requires at this unit count.
Get notified when construction actually starts
The permit record says it is beginning, not underway.
The area
Better than the beach against a hurricane, worse against the slow rise
The hazard picture here is genuinely two-sided and it follows from the water body. The parcel is in flood zone AE with a base flood elevation of about 6 feet, on an effective panel dated 2009. That is the lowest base flood elevation of the four waterfront comparables we ran: Eastern Shores and Aventura come back at 8 feet and Sunny Isles at 7. The panel is seventeen years older than the permit for the building that will sit on it.
On evacuation and surge the site does better than its neighbours. The evacuation zone is C, a category three zone, where the Eastern Shores address the marketing invokes is zone A, a category one. This site stays dry until a category four, while Eastern Shores and Sunny Isles take water at three. Being a mile and a half inland from the barrier island buys two storm categories.
And on sea level rise it does worse, for the same reason. This is the only one of the four waterfront sites wet at three feet of rise. The others stay dry to four. A tidal river reaches inland in a way the ocean does not, so the slow scenario finds this address before it finds the beach. Better against the storm, worse against the century. Both facts belong in the same sentence and almost nobody puts them there.
The postcode claim record makes the same point in dollars. This postcode has paid about $38,354,789 across 1,239 federal flood insurance claims, which is about 1.8 times the beach postcode's roughly $21.26 million. Its worst years are 2000, 2024, 2013 and 2009. Those are rain and king-tide years, not 1992 and 2017, which are the hurricane years. The inland postcode floods from rainfall and tide rather than from surge, and it costs more to do it.
So the insurance instruction is specific. Carry flood cover, because you will be required to and because the record says you should anyway, and ask what the building's finished floor elevation is against the 6-foot base flood elevation rather than accepting that it meets code. On a 34-unit building the master policy deductible is spread thin enough to hurt.
A context note about the block that a site visit would tell you anyway. The four neighbouring houses date from the mid-1950s and 1969 and all four are on the county's septic and well list. The subject is not. A thirty-four-unit condominium built to the current code is landing on a street of pre-Andrew single-family houses on septic, sixty metres from a tidal river. That is the character of the immediate surroundings today, and it is worth walking before you commit.
On schools and ownership, the short version. The attendance assignment runs through the county district layers and should be confirmed with the district, since those layers carry older modification dates. On ownership, the comparable set in this postcode is a mixed one rather than the investor-dominated pattern of the waterfront towers, which is consistent with the homestead exemption being worth 8.68 per cent here rather than the one to four per cent it is worth further south.
What you need to know
Buying pre-construction with someone on your side
Representation costs you nothing and the timing is the catch: in a pre-construction sales gallery your agent generally has to be with you or named at your very first contact for the registration to stand. Sort it out before you call.
The case for it here is that three of the most important facts about this address are counterintuitive. It is in no city, the water is a river rather than a canal, and the land carried a five-figure assessment that the county's own single-year tool reports as zero. None of those is discoverable from a listing and all three change the number.
The single highest-value question is the sewer assessment. Whether it re-attaches to the unit folios after the declaration records is not settled by any public record, and we tested three plausible formulas and falsified all of them. Somebody should be getting that answer from the county and from the developer, in writing, before contract.
Know what the statute gives you. On a developer sale you are entitled to the prospectus and the condominium documents, and you have a rescission right measured in days from the later of signing or delivery. The first ten per cent of your deposit is escrowed; above that the developer may spend it on construction once work has begun. We did not search Florida regulatory enforcement records or civil dockets for any builder, developer, contractor or land-holding entity, so read the absence of any such note as unchecked, not clean.
The rest is specific to a small waterfront building: get an independent inspection of your unit before closing and use the one-year window afterwards while the developer is still responsible. Ask what design wind speed and opening protection the plans are sealed to. Ask about the seawall or bank treatment on the river frontage, who maintains it and whether it is in the reserve schedule, because on thirty-four units that is the largest single number anyone will have to fund. Read the limited warranty before you sign.
Subdiview is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by 18550 IQ, any homebuilder, any developer of Canal by IQ, or Miami-Dade County. The developer is identified here because it is the developer of record in the state condominium filing, which is a statement of fact and not a representation of any relationship. Community names and marks are the property of their respective owners and are used for identification only. Subdiview is operated by a real estate broker licensed in Illinois. We are not your agent, we do not represent you, and we perform no real estate brokerage services in this state. No one at Subdiview is licensed in this state. If you join an interest list, your information is referred to a real estate professional licensed in the state where the property is located, who will contact you directly. We are compensated by that professional's brokerage, not by you. Pricing, plans, inventory, district, tax, flood and approval details on this page carry the dates shown, are as published, proposed or reported rather than committed, and are subject to change without notice.
Questions and answers
Canal by IQ FAQ
What is Canal by IQ, and where exactly is it?
It is a 34-unit waterfront condominium at 18550 NE 23 Court, filed with the state as Canal by IQ, a Condominium, with 18550 IQ as the developer of record. The location is the part everybody gets wrong: it is in unincorporated Miami-Dade County, in the Ojus area, with an Aventura postcode. It is not in North Miami Beach and not in Aventura. We confirmed that on three independent systems with controls that correctly return those two cities at other addresses. Eastern Shores, which the marketing invokes, is about a mile and a half away.
How many units, and how do you know?
Thirty-four, and we derived it from the water and sewer allocation record rather than from marketing. The department's verification form allocates 4,590 gallons a day to the site, and at the department's own per-unit rate of 135 gallons that is exactly 34 units. That number matters for more than scale: at 34 units this association clears the twenty-five-unit threshold that compels an association to maintain a website and post its budgets, contracts, insurance and inspection reports. Most of the small buildings we have looked at in this county fall below it and never have to publish anything.
Is being outside a city cheaper?
Substantially. The unincorporated rate is 16.8983 mills against North Miami Beach at 21.0007, which on the median comparable unit of about $473,224 is about $1,941 a year, or 24.3 per cent. Aventura is the odd one: at 16.7154 mills plus a $74.10 stormwater charge it lands about three dollars a year from this address. So a buyer choosing between this and Aventura is choosing on everything except tax, and a buyer who assumes this is North Miami Beach is overestimating the bill by nearly two thousand dollars.
Will there be assessments on top of the tax?
Probably not on your unit, but the land itself carried one and the usual tool hides it. The subject parcel paid about $6,405.42 in 2025 under a sanitary sewer district, a voluntary long-term assessment the developer opted into, and that charge is visible only on the two-year tax comparison; the single-year tool reports zero. More broadly, eight of ten unincorporated condominium units we sampled at random do carry some lighting, maintenance or solid waste line, which is the opposite of the pattern inside the cities. The Ojus area itself is clean, so a unit here should read zero, but ask for it in writing rather than assuming.
Is the water a canal?
No. The county's own waterway layer types it as a river and the recorded legal description calls it the east bank of the Oleta River. It is maintained by the state rather than by a local drainage district. That distinction is not pedantry: a tidal river carries water inland in a way a dead-end canal does not, which is why this site behaves better than the beach in a hurricane surge and worse than the beach against slow sea level rise.
What is the flood and storm picture?
Flood zone AE with a base flood elevation of about 6 feet, on an effective panel dated 2009, which is the lowest base flood elevation of the four waterfront comparables we ran. The evacuation zone is C, so this site evacuates two categories later than Eastern Shores, and it stays dry until a category four where Eastern Shores and Sunny Isles take water at three. The reverse is true on sea level rise: this is the only one of the four wet at three feet, while the others stay dry to four. Better against the storm, worse against the slow rise.
Be first in line
Get on the Canal by IQ interest list
We will connect you with a real estate professional licensed in Florida who represents you rather than the seller, who can register you before your first contact with the sales gallery, and who will get you the answers this page could not: whether the sewer assessment attaches to units, the proposed association budget and reserve schedule, the finished floor elevation against the base flood elevation, the river bank and seawall responsibility, the school assignment confirmed with the district, the real construction and turnover timetable, and pricing as soon as it exists.
It costs nothing, creates no brokerage relationship by itself, and does not obligate you to anything.