Miami is joked of as New York City’s sixth borough, but the relationship between the two cities’ real estate industries is serious.
The flight path between New York City and Miami International is one of the busiest domestic routes in the country, and some of Manhattan’s biggest developers have been flying south to invest billions in projects throughout the tri-county region. While the bond has existed for decades, pandemic market shifts deepened the connection between the already intertwined cities.
Miki Naftali, a longtime titan of luxury development in New York, has set his sights on the often-overlooked downtowns of Miami and Fort Lauderdale for his pipeline of South Florida projects. In 2022, he partnered with Cara Real Estate Management to drop $40.5 million on a Miami Worldcenter site where he plans a two-tower, 936-unit rental development. He also paid $20 million for a Fort Lauderdale site where he is planning a 251-unit Viceroy-branded condominium. “What is missing here is quality,” Naftali told TRD last year in an interview about the growing condo pipeline in Fort Lauderdale.