A price sheet for a South Florida condominium tower is rarely one document. It is four or five, issued months apart, and the residence on the 09 line appears on every one of them. Its exposure does not change between issues. Its ceiling height does not change. The number does. A buyer looking at the sheet on the day the building opens and a buyer looking at it when three quarters of the tower has gone are being quoted different money for the same apartment, and the distance between those two figures is the whole of what the market means when it talks about the value of being early.
Eric McNeil works across pre-construction real estate opportunities along the Miami to Palm Beach corridor and has developed relationships with luxury developers throughout South Florida. His view of access is narrower than the marketing version of it. Early access to a project does not make the opportunity inherently attractive. Instead, it creates additional time and visibility to evaluate the project, its structure and its underlying fundamentals before making a decision.
The spread the early buyer is actually buying
Developers may adjust pricing across different phases of a pre-construction release as inventory is absorbed and a project progresses. As a result, the timing of access can affect the entry structure available to a participant. That does not mean later pricing will necessarily be higher, and the value of early access ultimately depends on the performance of the individual project and the broader market.
An absorption forecast is a forecast. Miami-Dade has proved them wrong in both directions inside a single decade, and a buyer who signs in the first month is taking a position on the sponsor’s forecast as much as on the residence. The spread is real when a building runs to plan. It compresses when the building slows, and it inverts when the sponsor has to reprice to keep the sales floor moving, at which point the early buyer holds the most expensive contract in the tower rather than the cheapest.
What the same residence costs eighteen months later
The corridor’s recent record shows why the eighteen-month question has no single answer. Miami Realtors reported a median Miami-Dade condominium price of $425,000 in May 2025, flat against the previous year, on the back of what the association counted as fourteen consecutive years of appreciation and a rise of 103.3 percent over the decade from $209,000 in May 2015. Statewide, the same release recorded Florida condominium prices down 6.1 percent year on year.
By January 2026 the Miami-Dade condominium median stood at $420,000, up 1.2 percent on the year, with 12,509 condominium listings active and 13.7 months of supply, a figure the association classes as a buyer’s market. Resale stock is not new-development stock, and the two price on different logic. It is still the market an early buyer eventually sells into, and it has spent two years absorbing rather than escalating.
An eighteen-month gain between releases is a feature of a particular kind of cycle. It is not a property of pre-construction.
What the buyer surrenders in exchange
Capital committed to a pre-construction purchase may remain tied to the transaction for an extended period, creating an opportunity cost that should be considered alongside the potential benefits of early access.
The second is that no lender writes a mortgage commitment three years forward. A buyer who intends to finance at closing is underwriting a rate that does not exist yet, on a residence priced in a market that will not exist yet either. The third is the absence of comparables. A tower with no closed sales in it gives an appraiser nothing to work from except adjacent buildings that are a different product, which is why appraisal at closing is the point where pre-construction transactions most often go wrong.
Then there is the object itself. Until the building tops out, the residence exists as a floor plan, a finish schedule and a set of renderings drawn from the most flattering angle available, alongside the sponsor’s contractual right to substitute specified materials. Exit is a permission rather than a right: whether a contract can be assigned before closing, and on what conditions, is a clause in the purchase agreement and varies project by project.
The case against being early, argued properly
Any honest account has to include the buildings where the early position lost. The Real Deal reported in August 2025 on an analysis by Douglas Elliman agent David Siddons, built from Multiple Listing Service data, identifying a set of Miami condominium towers whose resale pricing has gone backwards. Faena House, by that account, fell from around $3,200 a square foot in 2022 to about $2,750 in 2025. Muse Residences went from roughly $1,600 to $1,425. Porsche Design Tower, on two 2025 sales, came in at $1,243 against a level nearer $2,000.
Those are not failed buildings. They are well-known towers with real amenity programmes, and people bought into them early on exactly the reasoning set out above. Market analyst Peter Zalewski, tracking the downtown market, reported in July 2025 that close to 24 percent of units at Aston Martin Residences were listed for resale, against a figure nearer 10 percent in a market he describes as balanced, with average asking prices sitting far above what was actually closing.
The lesson a practitioner takes from those numbers is that being early sets the entry price and does nothing else. It does not set the exit, it does not shorten the hold, and it offers no protection at all against a building that gets delivered into a soft quarter. Pre-construction carries the risk of loss, and arriving first carries it for longer than arriving last.
What access is worth once the discount is set aside
McNeil’s position is that the durable value of early access has little to do with price and a great deal to do with the calendar. A public launch compresses a decision about a three-year commitment into days, using material prepared by the party selling it. Hearing about a project before it opens converts days into weeks, and weeks are enough to walk the site at different hours, to look at how the sponsor’s last two buildings feel now that people live in them, and to have the condominium documents read properly rather than skimmed in a sales gallery on a Saturday.
The second thing weeks buy is the residence itself. A tower is a stack of different products sold under one name, and the corner plans, the higher floors and the lines that face water go first. Choosing the line is the decision that determines how a residence lives for twenty years, and no renovation recovers a view that was never there.
What early access does not do is make an opportunity inherently attractive, which is the distinction McNeil emphasizes. Access is valuable when it creates the time and visibility to evaluate a project before broader market exposure, not simply because an opportunity is available early. For McNeil, developer-direct access is built through long-term relationships across the South Florida luxury real estate market. Through McNeilX, that relationship-driven approach is focused on identifying and evaluating opportunities where the project, structure and participating partners are aligned from the outset.
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it is not investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Real estate and private market investments carry risk, including loss of principal, and nothing described here is a prediction of future results. Readers should consult their own licensed advisers before making any financial decision.
