Miami condominiums · buyers, tenants and owners

Stefania Riverin

A licensed Florida agent with over ten years in real estate investing and client representation in the Miami market. I represent buyers, sellers and tenants through the whole process, and the value I bring is knowing these buildings — what they cost to own, what their associations permit, and what has really traded inside them.

What I actually know

I came to this market as an investor before I represented anyone in it. A decade of buying, holding and letting property teaches something a licensing course cannot: what a building costs to own once the brochure is closed, which associations are straightforward to deal with, and how much of a projected return survives contact with an HOA budget. When I read a reserve study, I am reading it as someone who has paid an assessment.

That knowledge is the service. A residence is a straightforward thing to find — every portal carries the same inventory. Knowing which building to want, and why, is the part that takes years, and it is the part I am paid for.

Who I represent

Buyers. I shortlist on the building rather than the photography, read the declaration, budget and reserve study before an offer goes in, and tell you what the real monthly cost will be once the mortgage is only part of it.

Sellers. I price against what has genuinely traded in your own building — arm’s-length sales only — with the county assessment beside it, and I set up the tax mechanics early if you are not a US person.

Tenants. The association approves you, not the owner. It sets the minimum term, caps leases per year and can hold a deposit of its own. I have leased repeatedly in Edgewater on the tenant’s side and I know how those processes really run.

All three, in English or French, from the first question to the closing table.

At this price, the unit is the easy part

A Miami condominium at two, five or fifteen million dollars is not a difficult thing to find. Every portal has the same inventory, and the photography is excellent everywhere.

What is difficult is knowing what you are buying into. Since Surfside, the financial position of the building has become the single largest variable in the purchase — reserves that can no longer be waived, milestone inspections that surface eight-figure repairs, special assessments that are voted before they are ever billed. None of it appears on a listing. All of it appears in documents you are given a fixed number of days to read, often in your second or third language.

That is the work. Not finding the unit. Reading the building.

What that looks like, concretely

That fourth number is the one that affects you. Of 20,173 transfers recorded against these buildings, 4,836 are not sales at all — transfers between related entities, deeds in lieu of foreclosure, corrective deeds, hundred-dollar restructurings. Every one is a real deed. Not one tells you what a residence is worth.

They are excluded from every price on this site, and each building page says how many were excluded and why. It matters more than it sounds: in one oceanfront tower they are close to seven in ten recorded transfers. A price-per-foot figure that leaves them in looks perfectly normal and is badly wrong — which is the kind of number you would otherwise be negotiating against. Any building page shows the figure, the count behind it, what came out, and when it was checked.

Where I am useful

How I work

You will not be added to a drip campaign. You will not be called about a listing that has nothing to do with what you asked for. If a building has a problem I will tell you, even where that ends the conversation — a client who buys the wrong residence on my advice is worth considerably less to me than one who does not.

Where a question moves beyond real estate — cross-border tax, US estate exposure, immigration — I will say so and refer you to someone who does that work properly. I am a licensed real estate sales associate. I am not your accountant or your attorney, and the pages on this site that touch tax say so on the page rather than in a footer.