Building Boom in Miami’s Brickell Bucks National Bust
BY MIKE SEEMUTH
Edgardo Defortuna has millions of reasons to believe in Brickell, a bustling urban area just south of Downtown Miami. His company acquired 81 Brickell-area condominiums in a bulk purchase from Swire Properties in May, and by late July it had sold all but three, mainly to Latin American buyers.
“We were able to resell them immediately at approximately double the price that we bought them at,” said Defortuna, founder, president and CEO of Fortune International. He and Shahab Karmely’s KAR Properties flipped about a tenth of the units in the Reach and Rise condominiums, which opened in 2016 as part of Brickell City Centre, developed by the Hong Kong-based Swire. Brickell City Centre also includes two office buildings, a hotel and a multilevel, open-air shopping mall with restaurants and movie theaters.
Read More...
Twenty years ago, Brickell was a high-rise employment center where most sidewalks emptied after dark. “You didn’t want to be walking around at 10 o’clock at night,” said Miami real estate attorney Luis Flores. “I sold my condo unit on Brickell Avenue in 2006, and, boy, do I regret that. It’s such a vibrant neighborhood now.”
