Miami developers hunt for condo buyers from London to Latin America

Defortuna, a native Argentinian, was among the crowd at the expo, along with a brigade of South Florida real estate brokers and developers armed with branded tote bags and glossy brochures of the sleek condo towers they are selling. Usually there are 15,000 attendees; Defortuna said this year had double the turnout.

“Argentina is doing well, politically and economically. People are very interested in taking money out because they have lived through these good periods before and they know they need to diversify,” Defortuna said.

But the event is just one stop on Fortune’s 12-month travel schedule. Brokers, developers and members of trade groups like the Miami Association of Realtors, attend these expos to connect with agents and their international clients who are attracted to the promise of sun, safety and assets backed by the dollar. Similar scenes play out from Mexico City to Bogotá and London to Turkey. Funding for the trips typically comes from a project’s sales and marketing budget.

With higher interest rates, a tighter pool of American buyers and slowing sales, developers are returning to Miami’s development playbook from the early 2000s and 2010s, when foreign capital, especially from Latin America, propped up waves of construction.

“For a very long time in Miami, the Latin American buyer represented probably 70 to 80 percent of the buyers, but that shifted years ago,” Sharon Novotny, a senior vice president of development marketing at Douglas Elliman, said. Blame the Yankees: “Because of the influx of that Northeastern buyer, and domestic in general, those numbers changed.”

Meanwhile, buyers from Mexico and Latin America fell off as the dollar’s value grew, in part because their purchasing power declined.

But they didn’t disappear entirely, and brokers have been working on rebuilding their ties to existing foreign buyer pools while also tapping into new ones, in Europe and beyond. Brokers hope they can fill the pipeline for preconstruction projects in particular.

The condo market in South Florida is divided into a few segments: older inventory, existing condos under 30 years old, and preconstruction. The older condos are struggling the most, in part because of increased regulations, a reaction to the deadly Surfside condo collapse in 2021.

But preconstruction has slowed too, according to Craig Studnicky, CEO of Aventura-based brokerage firm ISG World, especially in the last year. He blames this on the American buyer not wanting to wait for the four, five or six years it takes to complete a tower.

“Only about half of the projects [in the pipeline] have broken ground,” he said. “Latin Americans like to send money every month. They’ll send you $20,000 a month for the next four years. When Americans look at the delivery dates, they back off.”

Also, there are just too many condo-hotels in Miami, which had been a favorite for Latin American buyers until the market got oversaturated.

“There’s just too much inventory of short-term rental [friendly] condos,” Studnicky said. “Almost 14,000 of them are in development since Covid.”

Marketing the mission

A June 5 New York Times article really galled Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, managing partner of her family’s brokerage firm, Cervera Real Estate.

Its headline: “Foreign Buyers Are Fleeing the South Florida Condo Market.”

“I looked at it and I thought this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve read in a long time,” Cervera, who’d like to flip the narrative that international investors have left the Miami market, said. She rattles off a list of countries from which buyers are flocking to Miami: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Spain, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile.

The Times’ story referred to a Miami Association of Realtors’ report that found home sales to foreign buyers fell to 10 percent of all transactions in the tri-county region between August 2023 and July 2024, the lowest share since 2015. That report was a survey of nearly 2,400 real estate agents in Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Martin counties.

But new developments, where the international investor had a bigger presence, likely weren’t included.

“Latin Americans like to send money every month. They’ll send you $20,000 a month for the next four years. When Americans look at the delivery dates, they back off.”Craig Studnicky, ISG World

At Okan Tower, a Hilton-branded hotel-condo tower under construction in downtown Miami, Turkish developer Okan Group has locked in contracts to buyers across Latin America, in Mexico, Spain and Turkey. Of the international sales, nearly a quarter are to Mexican buyers, a spokesperson said. The second-biggest foreign buyer pool hails from Colombia. Fortune is leading sales.

Defortuna said that he’s seeing projects attract buyers from the usual suspects: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. That’s especially helpful in the summer months, which are slow for American buyers.

“Certainly, the urgency from the U.S. market to move to South Florida has slowed down,” Defortuna said.

This summer, Cervera’s sales team locked in 77 signed contracts at Ricardo Dunin’s two condo-hotel projects in Brickell, Domus Brickell Park and Domus Brickell Center. The average price of the units sold is $584,000. Nearly two thirds of these buyers is international, and most are Latin American, Dunin said.

Cervera and other brokerage heads joined forces with the Miami Association of Realtors to put out a new report, one tracking new development presales. Cervera, ISG, PMG, Serhant and One Sotheby’s International Realty contributed sales information from their projects — a total of 9,115 condos — and found that about half of the roughly 5,500 presold units in their new construction pipeline are being purchased by foreign buyers.

This report relies on information provided by the developers and their sales team because preconstruction sales aren’t public record, so its results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Still, most brokers tell a similar story of heightened interest from international crowds, including Daniel de la Vega, CEO of One Sotheby’s, who points to Colombian buyers pulling big numbers.

In addition to Mexico and Latin America, One Sotheby’s is targeting London, Italy and Turkey, he said. During Wimbledon, the brokerage promoted projects that included Ponce Park Residences, Surf Row Residences, the Standard Residences, Brickell, and the Dolce & Gabbana-branded 888 Brickell.

Sales overall are slower but steady, de la Vega said. He travels around the world and said he finds events targeting buyers more effective than those held for brokers.

“The high-end market is still performing very, very well,” de la Vega said.

Across the Atlantic 

While the typical South American buyer concentrates on the lower-price-point developments in urban cores, the European, Middle Eastern and British buyers go for higher-end condos, said Compass agent Miltiadis Kastanis.

This is good for developers, as there’s been a shift toward smaller projects that have pricier units and the potential for more upside. For them, it makes sense to spend money to send teams to sell in London, especially now that the British pound buys you double the space in Miami as at home, according to Michael Patrizio, a managing director at Mast Capital.

“We’re seeing a lot of the wealth in the U.K. is looking in two directions: Florida or Dubai,” Patrizio said. Of Mast’s contracts at the Perigon Residences, a luxury condo building it’s developing with Starwood Capital Group, more than a third of the international deals are to U.K. buyers. And 15 percent of the contracts signed at Mast’s Cipriani Residences in Brickell are to European buyers, Patrizio said.

Damac Properties, the Dubai developer that plans the ultra-luxury Delmore Residences on the site of the deadly Surfside condo collapse, and Douglas Elliman, its brokerage, have held events abroad in London and Spain to target ultra-high-net-worth buyers. That strategy is particularly important for the Delmore, where local and Latin American buyers may still associate the site with tragedy.

Novotny said Elliman is planning a private launch event in Germany later this year to unveil The Cloud One Hotel & Residences Wynwood, a condo project led by German developers Sebastian Lüdke of ALP.X Group, Motel One and Ralf Büschl of the Büschl Group.

“We have not even launched our penthouse collection and we already have a couple of Germans interested,” Novotny said. “The big driver is there’s this shift in seeing New York as the gateway [to the U.S.]. They’re starting to see Miami as the gateway.”

Hesitations

Still, buyers won’t sign contracts on the spot. The bigger the price point, the longer a deal takes to materialize.

And some European and Latin American buyers are taking a beat before pulling the trigger on a purchase because of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Julian Johnston, a top agent with the Corcoran Group, pointed to Canadians’ exit from the market as a potential deal killer. (Earlier this year, Related Group CEO Jon Paul Pérez said Trump’s tariffs on Canada killed prospective sales at a project in Pompano Beach to about 10 Canadian buyers.)

The perception of what’s happening in the U.S, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s raids in June and Trump’s tariffs, has also reached European clients.

Johnston has a French client who wants to relocate because he feels Paris is too dangerous. But, “he wants to see what happens with Trump. He doesn’t like the uncertainty,” Johnston said.

The president is “in a massive brawl with Brazil” and the middle class, “the people who spend money here in the winter time, they care,” Johnston added.

While his wealthy clients are less concerned with having issues securing visas, their house staff could have a harder time. The ICE raids “caused a lot of hesitancy,” Studnicky said, though it hasn’t so far stopped international buyers from signing contracts.

Defortuna said the foreign buyers his firm works with are already familiar with the visa process.

Most brokers said Trump’s policies have had little effect on international buyers, as people in these countries are used to political instability. They just want a safe place to park their cash.

“It’s culturally comfortable with Latin Americans to have these conversations,” said Mast’s Patrizio.