Zalewski, Condo Vultures® Celebrate 20 Years Of 'Killing Comps' In Miami Condo Market

This week’s Miami Condo Market Intelligence Report™ newsletter look backs at the firm's 2006 founding, the parallels to today's correction and the lessons learned by the characters who were there.In this week’s issue of the Miami Condo Market Intelligence Report™ newsletter, we step back from the weekly data analysis to mark an anniversary that is either a testament to institutional patience or a cautionary tale about a South Florida real estate market that refuses to correct itself in a timely fashion—possibly both.April 2006 marked the formal launch of Condo Vultures® following incorporation the previous month of March 2006 when Zalewski left the journalism that he had studied at the University of Missouri.The company name and tagline were blunt: Killing Comps Since 2006™.The full story of how that happened—and what it produced—is best told by the people who were there.The anniversary celebration occurred on the April 8, 2026, episode of The Peter Zalewski Show™ that aired on MiamiCondo.Club.The episode—provided below—brings many of the players together for the first time in two decades. Watch it.From Newsroom To Buyside BrokerageThe origin of Condo Vultures® is, at its core, a story about recognizing when the game has changed before everyone else does.Before the pivot to buyside brokerage services, more than 13 years were spent in journalism covering the banking and real estate machinery behind the most aggressive condo construction cycle in South Florida history.The foundation for that work was laid alongside titans of the South Florida business press, including Miami Herald reporter and editor Larry Birger, whose “South Florida Business Focus” program on WLRN set the standard for cutting through the spin to deliver verifiable, defendable and actionable information to an audience that deserved better than a press release.Miami Daily Business Review columnist Charles Kimball—whose family passed down his legendary handwritten index cards cataloguing years of South Florida transactions—was another early influence in that same tradition.The analytical framework for understanding the condo market itself came from a generation of South Florida real estate experts whose rigor shaped the way the numbers were read, including Jack McCabe, Lewis Goodkin and the late Michael Y. Cannon.These were not commentators. They are analysts who built their reputations on data at a time when data was hard to get and harder to interpret.That reporting background turned out to be the most valuable asset the Condo Vultures® operation would ever have.The developers, lenders, investors and regulators who built the South Florida condo market had all been interviewed so their business models were not mysteries.When the moment came to cross from the press box to the field, the learning curve that stops most people simply did not exist.After leaving journalism in March 2006, the focus narrowed to the South Florida condo market, first as a buyside operator executing bulk transactions during the bust, then as a Wall Street consultant, market analyst and expert witness drawing on the same data discipline that had powered the brokerage work.What did exist from the start was a thesis and a name—Condo Vultures®—that the industry hated on sight.That reaction was the first confirmation the thesis was correct. Grinding AdvantageThe competitive edge was not technology. Big Data was not a concept in 2006. The platforms, algorithms and automated valuation tools that analysts take for granted today did not exist.Building a statistical picture of the South Florida condo market meant pulling Florida Sunshine Law public records by hand, visiting the courthouse, cross-referencing county filings manually and grinding through the numbers one building at a time.That grinding process was the advantage.Every other participant in the market was operating on instinct and marketing materials