What the island houses have actually sold for

Every figure on this page comes from the Miami-Dade County property roll — not from a listing portal, not from a brokerage report, and not from anybody's press release. It counts only transfers the state marks as arm's length, it tells you how many were thrown out to get there, and it tells you how few sales some of these islands produce in a year. Read September 8, 2026.

The table

Sorted by the median of qualified sales recorded since the start of 2024. Read thecount column before you read the median beside it — on several of these islands the whole market is a handful of houses a year, and a median of four sales is an anecdote with a decimal point rather than a market rate. Each island name opens its own page, with the individual recorded sales and the rules that govern the parcel.

What the numbers do not say

A median is not an appraisal, and on a street of thirty-three houses it is barely a statistic. What actually sets the price of one of these parcels is water frontage and its orientation, lot width at the seawall, whether the house is worth keeping or is really land, and what a buyer would have to spend to bring the seawall and the elevation up to the current standard. Two houses on the same island, the same year, the same square footage, can be a long way apart on all four.

The median $/sf column is the most easily misread figure here. Heated area is a poor denominator on a waterfront lot, because a meaningful share of the value is in the ground and the frontage rather than in the building standing on it — and on several of these parcels the building is a teardown that the price ignores entirely.

• What to check before offering — the seven authorities, the elevation rule, the seawall standard and the dock permits
• Whether the boat can leave — the federal clearances between these basins and open water
• The approval and the fee — several communities here require membership to reside and charge five figures at transfer
• The condominium side — 46 towers, the same county record, the same exclusions

Why the islands read the way they do

These are made ground. Star, Palm and Hibiscus were pumped out of the bottom of Biscayne Bay and finished in 1922; the Venetian chain came the same way. That history is why the lots are regular, why the water is on both sides of a street rather than at the end of one, and why a causeway with a drawbridge is the only way on or off.

It also explains the light, which is the part no data table holds. A house here has bay on one side and open sky on the other, the water throws light back up into the rooms all afternoon, and the downtown skyline sits across the bay close enough to read the buildings and far enough to be quiet. That is a real thing people buy and it is worth naming — but it is not a number, and this page keeps the two apart on purpose.

Source: Miami-Dade County ArcGIS Comparable Sales layer, single-family parcels, read September 8, 2026. Only transfers the Florida Department of Revenue marks as qualified are included in any median. The county publishes its roll subject to its own disclaimer and it can lag a recorded deed by roughly a week and a half.