North Beach

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Market snapshot · Pricing by tier · Since 2016 · What defines it · The building generations · Elevation and flood · Inspections and reserves · Buyer guide · Method and sources

Market snapshot: what North Beach condos sell for

North Beach condominiums traded at a median of $1,545 per square foot over the trailing twenty-four months, across 369 qualifying arms-length sales, at a median price of $970,000 and a median residence size of 884 square feet. The highest single residential transfer in that window was $27,760,000.

Those figures cover all 29 North Beach buildings in the Index — the same set listed at the foot of this page. The submarket is not one market, though, so read the tier table before treating that median as a description of any particular building.

Everything here is computed from Miami-Dade County recorded transfers, using the Property Appraiser's own arms-length qualification. Not listing data, and not our estimate. The record runs back to 1970, across 6,948 qualifying transfers.

A note on method that matters more in Miami than most places: 348 recorded transfers in this submarket are bulk portfolio deeds — a single instrument conveying many residences at once, which the county records at the full portfolio price against every unit folio in it. Left in, one such deed can invent a nine-figure "sale." They are excluded throughout.

North Beach condo prices by tier

The single median hides the spread. Splitting the 29 buildings at $2,000,000 median per-unit just value — the appraiser's assessment, not a judgement of ours — gives two markets that barely overlap.

The upper tier trades at 1.3× the lower tier. A figure quoted for "North Beach" without saying which tier it describes is close to meaningless.

What North Beach has done since 2016

Two series, because the raw one is not a trend measure. When a tower delivers, its sponsor closings enter the record all at once and at prices unlike anything the resale stock is doing — so a raw median tracks the delivery calendar as much as the market.

The same-cohort series strips that out: only buildings delivered 2009 or earlier (19 of the 29 here), and only from the third year after delivery onward. The same buildings, start to finish.

The gap between those rows is the entire argument for the method. The raw series says +209.2%; the same buildings measured against themselves say +23.8%. Use the second.

For scale over a comparable span, the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National index rose roughly 33% in real terms and its Miami metro index roughly 51%. Nearly every American housing market gained ground in this period. The question for a submarket is whether it beat that, not whether it rose.

2026 is a partial year and is excluded from the change calculation.

What defines North Beach as a market

North Beach is Miami Beach above 63rd Street to the Surfside line — 29 buildings, the smallest barrier-island submarket in this Index. It is also the one where the raw and same-cohort series disagree most violently, and understanding why is most of what a buyer needs here.

The raw series reads +209.2% nominal since 2016. The same-cohort series reads +23.8%. That gap — the largest in this Index — is almost entirely Eighty Seven Park, the Renzo Piano building at the Surfside line delivered in 2019, which records $2,694 per square foot against a lower tier at $1,538. A handful of very expensive new deliveries entering a small submarket moves a raw median enormously. It does not mean the existing stock did that.

In real terms the existing stock is −7.7% since 2016. That is the number to use.

The neighbourhood's own history is the North Shore / Normandy Isles postwar development and the MiMo — Miami Modern — vocabulary of the 1950s. The North Shore National Register district was listed in 2009. Much of the stock is small: the median residence here is 884 square feet, the smallest in the Index, which is again why $/sf runs high next to a median price of only $970,000.

North Beach has been the subject of sustained municipal rezoning debate for a decade, aimed at encouraging redevelopment while preserving the MiMo fabric. The 7 buildings delivered since 2010 are the visible result.

The building generations

Elevation and flood

Of the 29 buildings in the Index here, the FEMA National Flood Hazard Layer puts 19 in Zone AE, 10 in Zone X.

North Beach has the highest share of Zone X in the Index outside the mainland — the Normandy Isles and North Shore ridge sit marginally higher than the beachfront. Ten of the buildings here read X against nineteen AE.

The thing most buyers still get wrong: since FEMA's Risk Rating 2.0 took full effect in April 2023, the flood zone no longer sets the price of an NFIP policy. Rating is now driven by the individual structure — its elevation, replacement cost, distance to water, flood frequency. A Zone AE address is not automatically more expensive to insure than a Zone X one.

For a condominium buyer there is a second layer: most associations here carry an RCBAP master policy covering the building, which satisfies the federal mandatory-purchase requirement at the building level. The unit owner's exposure is usually contents and improvements, plus their share of the master premium through the monthly assessment. Ask for the master policy declarations page, not just the zone.

Inspections and reserves

Florida's post-Surfside regime is the largest source of unpriced exposure in an older Miami condominium, and it applies squarely to the stock here. Milestone inspections, Structural Integrity Reserve Studies, and the end of the reserve-waiver vote together mean an association's assessment history is no longer a guide to its assessment future.

The full framework — statutes, thresholds, the questions to ask before you sign — is set out in post-Surfside condo diligence. Read it before making an offer on anything here built before 2000.

Buyer guide

Ignore the raw trend line. +209.2% is an artifact of a handful of very expensive deliveries landing in a small submarket. The existing stock did +23.8% nominal and −7.7% real. North Beach is the clearest case in Miami-Dade for why the two-series method exists.

The small median residence drives the headline. At 884 square feet, North Beach posts the highest median $/sf in this Index on the second-lowest median price. Those are the same fact seen twice.

Redevelopment risk cuts both ways. Ongoing rezoning is what produced the new tier; it also means the block around a given building may change materially. Check current zoning and any pending applications adjacent to anything you are considering.

MiMo-district stock carries design review. As in South Beach, exterior work on contributing structures goes through a process. Confirm district status before assuming a renovation scope.

Method and sources

Every figure on this page derives from Miami-Dade County recorded transfers, retrieved from the Property Appraiser and rolled up by parent folio. Prices are the recorded consideration; where a deed records nominal consideration, price is derived from documentary stamps at $0.60 per $100 and flagged as derived.

"Arms-length" is the Property Appraiser's own qualification code, not our judgement. Price per square foot uses the unit's living area from the appraiser's record; sales with no recorded area are excluded from $/sf figures but counted in transfer totals. Values below $50 and above $20,000 per square foot are treated as recording artifacts and dropped, as are the 348 bulk portfolio deeds described above.

The trailing-24-month window runs to 2 August 2026. Real-terms figures deflate by CPI-U annual averages. Building facts — year built, residence counts, architects, developers, flood zone — come from the appraiser's parcel record, checked against recognized references including the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.

Coverage is what the county has recorded, which means it is complete for transfers and incomplete for anything the county does not collect. We do not publish list prices, days on market, or discount-to-ask for this market, because the recorded record cannot support them.