Michael Fay.
Michael T. Fay
Chairman of the U.S. capital markets executive committee at Avison Young
As Northerners relocated to South Florida during the pandemic and developers from across the country followed suit, land in Miami became a hot commodity.
Despite the added hurdles, Michael Fay has continued to dominate the field.
In the past two years, the Avison Young broker negotiated some of the biggest and most notable land deals. Just look at Edgewater, a neighborhood seeing a rush of residential development. In 2021, Fay, along with his team, sold a 3-acre developable parcel for $105 million to multifamily developer Mello Group, setting a new benchmark for the neighborhood. The next year he outdid himself, brokering the bulk buyout of a waterfront condo building for $150 million where The Edition condo project will rise.
Perhaps no sale was more consequential and delicate to navigate than that of the site left behind by the Champlain Towers South condo building, the 2021 collapse of which killed 98. The judge presiding over the case and the court receiver hand-picked Fay to handle the sale. A little over a year after the tragedy struck, the land sold for $120 million to Dubai-based developer Damac Properties.
Now the broker is taking on the biggest assignment of his 40-year career, selling a 15.5-acre waterfront site between the Venetian and MacArthur causeways for over $1 billion. If achieved, the sale could become one of the most expensive land trades ever in the U.S.
“Yes, there is pressure on us. Yes, we want to perform,” Fay said. “I would love to see $1.8 billion or $2 billion. I don’t know if the market gets there. But if you look at the comps in the low, you’re getting $1.3 billion. If you look at the highest comps, you’re getting $2.2 billion.”
Fay credits his success to the diversification of his team, which works to uncover the hidden value of a property by identifying different uses for them. “We’ll sit there and say, ‘You could do a hotel, but you know what? Let’s add an office component because it would feed the hotel. And let’s throw a little retail there,’ ” Fay said.
An example of this approach was the $100 million sale last year of an ailing mall in Cutler Bay that will be turned into a $1 billion mixed-use development. — J.E.
