Miami

Miami leads South Florida in finance and commerce, in culture and media, in entertainment and international trade. The 2020 census counted 442,241 residents in the city proper — the second-largest city in Florida — at the center of a metropolitan area of more than six million. PortMiami is the busiest cruise port in the world, Brickell Avenue holds the largest concentration of international banks in the country, and Miami International Airport ties the city to Latin America and Europe.

For a buyer, though, Miami is not one market but a dozen. The bayfront corridor north of downtown — Edgewater and Midtown — holds the tall towers along Biscayne Boulevard and North Bayshore Drive. Coconut Grove keeps to lower buildings on and around South Bayshore Drive. Wynwood has only recently begun taking new residential buildings at all. South and west of the city line, in unincorporated Miami-Dade — Kendall, Dadeland, the Hammocks — the low-rise condominium and townhouse stock houses a large share of the county.

That spread means one search term covers a boutique building of eleven live-work residences and a 698-residence tower on the bay. It is worth settling early which Miami you are buying into: the neighborhoods differ from one another far more than the buildings within any one of them do.