"Even $1 million won't buy us anything around here," a former board member at Solaris at Brickell Bay told the Miami Herald in January 2025. By then, county records showed LLCs buying units in the building had paid $1 million for a 1,064-square-foot condo that had sold for $315,000 in 2018.
Eighteen months later, every one of Solaris's 138 condos belonged to entities tied to Ken Griffin. According to Robb Report, citing Bloomberg, the purchase was assembled one apartment at a time over three years for roughly $125 million, and it included the ground-floor retail spaces. Some of the final holdouts reportedly received seven-figure payouts, and some earlier sellers later said they wished they had held out longer.
That pattern holds well beyond Solaris. When a Miami condo is bought out for its land, Florida's termination rules make the last unsold units the most valuable ones in the building. And the public record often makes it hard for the earlier sellers to see that.
A Deed Recorded at $100
Look up Solaris sales in county records and some of them show a price of $100. The holdout owners told the Herald they believed those figures were meant to hide the real prices and leave them without points of comparison.
In an ordinary resale, a condo owner prices a unit against recorded sales in the building. During a quiet buyout, the recorded sales can stop reflecting what the buyer is actually paying. The purchases at Solaris came through anonymous Delaware LLCs, each buying an individual unit for cash, as Miami New Times reported. Griffin was confirmed as the buyer in June 2026, when a Citadel executive said so at a Bisnow summit.
The Solaris Price Ladder
The Herald pieced together the part of the ladder that was visible from property records and owner interviews. Solaris opened in 2006 at 186 SE 12th Terrace, and many owners had bought at modest prices.
| Rung | Price reported |
|---|---|
| What many owners originally paid | $200,000 to $450,000 |
| One owner's 2023 written offer | $550,000 |
| Range paid by LLCs tied to Lincoln Property Company since December 2022 | $500,000 to $1.1 million |
| One 1,064-square-foot unit bought for $315,000 in 2018 | Sold for $1 million in 2023 |
| A later phone offer to the same owner who got $550,000 in writing | Around $1 million |
| Holdout group's requested price, through its attorney | $3,500 per square foot |
The attorney, representing more than 20% of owners, put the $3,500 figure in concrete terms: $3.5 million for a 1,000-square-foot condo. That was an asking price, and no reported sale confirms it was paid. What the table does show is that offers kept rising as more units changed hands.
Building costs also pushed owners toward selling. Solaris owners were hit with a $2 million assessment for pool and garage repairs in 2024, and the holdout group lost members as offers improved. In a buyout, an assessment pushes owners toward selling early, at the lower rungs.
Why About Seven Units Can Stop 138
Under Section 718.117 of the 2026 Florida Statutes, an optional termination of a residential condominium needs approval from at least 80% of total voting interests. The statute then adds:
"However, if 5 percent or more of the total voting interests of the condominium have rejected the plan of termination by negative vote or by providing written objections, the plan of termination may not proceed."
A rejection by 5% or more also bars a new plan for 24 months. In a 138-unit building where each unit casts one vote, 5% works out to about seven units. A buyer can own the overwhelming majority and still be stalled for two years by a handful of owners. That is why the final units cost the most.
The statute also sets minimums for owners who stay until the end. Once a single bulk owner holds at least 80% of voting interests when the plan is recorded, the other owners must receive at least 100% of fair market value, set by an independent appraiser. For homesteaded owners who are current on their association obligations, fair market value is at least the original purchase price, and they also receive a relocation payment equal to 1% of the termination proceeds allocated to their unit. If the former units are later offered for lease to the public, owners in occupancy can lease back their former unit for 12 months on market terms.
In practice, the lower rungs are deals owners accept voluntarily, before any of these minimums apply. When the Herald reported on Solaris, the buying LLCs owned at least half the units but had not reached the 80% threshold.
The Same Curve in Coconut Grove and Edgewater
Two finished buyouts near Brickell show the same pattern, with hard numbers.
At Bayshore Park in Coconut Grove, BH Group and Mast Capital completed a $28 million buyout in March 2026. The Real Deal reported that seven holdouts averaged $985,700, nearly $324,000 more than the $661,800 average accepted by 32 neighbors the previous summer. Here too the holdout group numbered seven.
Biscayne 21, a 1964 tower at 2121 North Bayshore Drive in Edgewater, shows how much a building's own documents matter. Two Roads Development bought most of its units in 2022. Holdout owners then challenged the termination, arguing that the developer-controlled association had improperly amended the declaration to lower the termination threshold from 100% of owners to 80%. The Third District Court of Appeal ruled that lowering the threshold this way was illegal. As The Real Deal reported, the holdouts settled at the end of August 2026 for about $50 million combined, or roughly $6.3 million per owner. One holdout told the outlet that the developer had offered him nearly $1.3 million in 2021.
So the 80% figure in the statute is a minimum. A building's declaration can set a higher threshold, and changing it is open to legal challenge.
Where the Rest of the Spread Goes
Some of the value in a buyout goes to whoever finishes assembling the building. El Vedado, a four-story, 36-unit condo at 237 SW 13th Street built in 1972, was bought out for a combined $21.76 million between December 2024 and May 2025. Four days later the site sold to Grupo T&C for $27.55 million, as The Real Deal reported at the time. On a per-unit basis, that is roughly $604,000 paid to owners and roughly $765,000 paid by the next buyer. The 2025 account names Habitat Group as the assembler. A later report names a different seller and rounds the price to $27.6 million.
Grupo T&C has since filed a pre-application with Miami-Dade County for 13th Edge, a proposed 62-story building with 400 apartments and 400 hotel rooms on a site that held 36 condos. The existing building covers 31,700 square feet, and the proposal runs to 648,700.
Reading an Older Brickell Building With This in Mind
None of this means an older Brickell condo comes with a built-in buyout premium. Most buildings will never get an offer. When one does, the outcome depends on things a portal listing never shows, starting with the termination threshold in the declaration, as Biscayne 21 shows. It also depends on the building's assessment history, because the $2 million assessment at Solaris arrived while owners were weighing offers. And it depends on whether recent recorded prices reflect real deals.
Solaris itself is moving on. Griffin plans to replace it with 300 apartments and a garage of more than 1,400 spaces, and Bisnow reported in late July that demolition was expected to begin soon. Across Brickell Bay Drive at 1201, work on the Citadel headquarters resumed after Miami-Dade approved the contractor's revised safety plan on October 7, following a September 14 drill-rig collapse, The Real Deal reported.
The next Brickell-area test is the St. Louis on Brickell Key. As of late April 2026, The Related Group and Terra Group were negotiating with owners of nearly 80% of its 134 units, and one estimate put a deal near $1.5 million per unit. The report said a deal could close next year, and no later outcome has been reported.
For context on the wider resale market, MIAMI REALTORS reported 12.3 months of supply for existing Miami-Dade condos in September 2026, which it classifies as a buyer's market, with inventory down 7.24% year over year to 11,706 listings. Those are countywide figures, and they leave out new-construction and preconstruction sales, which mostly go unreported in the MLS. A buyout price works differently from those figures. It reflects what the land is worth to a developer, so it can sit well above the building's resale price whatever the resale market is doing.
A Few Distinct Questions
Does the 80% rule apply to every Florida condo? The statute sets 80% approval for optional termination of a residential association, with a 5% rejection rule. Biscayne 21 shows that a building's own declaration can require more, such as 100%.
What does a homesteaded owner receive in a bulk-owner termination? Under Section 718.117, fair market value of at least the original purchase price if the owner is current on association obligations, plus a relocation payment equal to 1% of the termination proceeds allocated to the unit.
Can a recorded sale price be misleading? At Solaris, some deeds showed $100, which holdout owners said hid the true prices.
This post is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice. Anyone weighing a termination plan or a bulk offer should confirm how it applies to them with an attorney and the appropriate advisors.
At Mariela Hopen, we follow assemblages and termination activity across Brickell and the barrier islands closely. If you own in, or are considering, an older building where land value may matter more than the unit itself, request exclusive access to a private conversation about what its documents and recent sales actually show.
