Will Mandarin Oriental Condo Project's Lengthy Construction Threaten Prices On Brickell Key?

In this episode of Miami Condo Mondays™, the hosts mark 20 years of Condo Vultures® while sizing up the prospects of unit owners on Brickell Key as a developer prepares to build two new towers.Miami Condo Mondays™ features Peter Zalewski of the Miami Condo Investing Club™ and veteran broker Jenny Huertas of CVRRealty.com in a weekly deep dive into South Florida condo real estate.Recorded in Greater Downtown Miami, the podcast delivers an hour of high-level analysis on preconstruction condos, market trends and investment strategies for the tricounty South Florida region of Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.The show leverages more than 60 years of combined institutional knowledge as Zalewski provides the macro perspective and Huertas offers on-the-ground micro insights from her daily experience in the trenches.The show streams live every Monday at 4 pm on the social media accounts of both hosts to provide an authoritative look at the latest shifts in the condo market.Episode OverviewIn this episode of the Miami Condo Mondays™ podcast on April 13, 2026, co-hosts Jenny Huertas of CVR Realty and Peter Zalewski of the Miami Condo Investing Club™ examine Greater Downtown Miami’s Brickell Avenue Area—a submarket of more than 100 condo towers and 30,000 units—with less than three weeks left in the ever-important South Florida Winter Buying Season of November through April.The latest data for this analysis was collected for the upcoming Brickell Avenue Area Condo Correction Walking Tour™ scheduled for 10 am Saturday, April 18, 2026. The Brickell Avenue Area is defined as the Eddie Rickenbacker Causeway north to the Miami River, and Biscayne Bay west to I-95.During the 74-minute podcast, Huertas and Zalewski also mark the 20th anniversary of Condo Vultures®, the research and brokerage firm Zalewski founded two decades ago with the tagline "Killing comps Since 2006," a reference to using data to push back against the inflated price comparables that developers and sellside brokers routinely use to “justify” asking prices.The Brickell Avenue Area currently has 1,170 condos listed for sale at an average asking price of $842 per square foot, and those listings have been sitting on the market for an average of 167 days—nearly the entire six-month-long Winter Buying Season—without finding a buyer.That compares to the $656 per square foot that condos actually traded for during the busy Summer Buying Season of 2025, creating a premium of roughly 28% that is well above the 20% spread Zalewski uses as a benchmark for a balanced market.The Brickell Avenue Area is currently in a Deteriorating Buyers Market with 16.8 months of condo resale supply, according to the Miami Condo Supply Tracker™. With just 18 days left in the Winter Buying Season, sellers who have not cut prices are running out of time before Summer’s heat, humidity and hurricane season thin the buyer pool for another six months.For buyers willing to look past the shiny marketing of preconstruction projects, the hosts pointed to Vintage condos—units at least 30 years old—as the area of the market where the math is closest to making sense, trading at roughly a 36% discount to the Overall market.On the rental side, the median lease price of about $3,700 per month implies a market value of around $370,000 per unit under the “1% Rule” of real estate investing versus an average asking price of $1.3 million. This spread means most of today’s buyers would effectively be subsidizing their tenants at the current asking prices.The most telling sign of where the Brickell Avenue Area submarket is heading came from a cloud of dust on Sunday morning, April 12, 2026, when Huertas watched the Mandarin Oriental Hotel come down in a controlled implosion on Brickell Key.