The collapse of Champlain Towers South in Surfside has set off a domino effect in South Florida real estate, one that NBC News’ Phil McCausland says could “[reshape] South Florida’s real estate market as a whole.”
Given the structural damage reported in Champlain Towers South’s 2018 engineering report, a growing number of older building owners have pushed to get engineering reports for their own properties. Adam Mopsick, CEO of Amicon, reports that his firm has experienced a massive uptick in calls, and has had to increase the price of his services because he does not have enough engineers to fulfill every request.
Mopsick says that if it turns out a building needs “major remediation” or tens of millions of dollars in repairs for owners to cover, older buildings may end up “dumped” by their owners—paving the way for investors to come and replace them.
Paul Sasseville, a real estate agent for Compass Florida, said he had already received a call from a client in New York who asked whether this would be a real estate buying opportunity. The client equated it to the market in communities along the East Coast after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 caused excessive damage and forced many to sell.
“All the best properties were built in the '70s, '80s and '90s on this good waterfront land,” Sasseville said of Miami Beach. “Now you’re going to see what we call condo terminations, where developers buy out old buildings, tear them down and put up new ones.”
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