For decades, Bal Harbour was the only shopping destination in the Miami area for customers seeking a wide assortment of luxury goods. But times are a changing and with that, Miami Design District – once a sleepy swath of furniture stores – is fast becoming a new destination of luxury shops.
Louis Vuitton’s flagship store is one of about 20 top-drawer brands set to open in the district this month. Nearby will be Valentino, Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari and …
by Riccardo Ravasini 
Miami’s version of Art Basel has helped reposition the city as a global destination for influencers, billionaires, and partygoers. And this year’s Art Basel – which wrapped up earlier this month – was no exception, with over 70,000 attendees at the main fair generating more than $20 million in revenue. This establishment of a global art scene has not only spotlighted Miami as an international city but also boosted its luxury real estate market. While real estate prices haven’t quite …
by Riccardo Ravasini A new batch of efficiency units can be found in luxury buildings, as developers seek ways to add value for high-end buyers while keeping a lid on their owns costs.
Unlike the sprawling trophy apartments that have hit the market in the past few years, tighter-cut units at buildings like 15 Leonard Street, the Charles at 1355 First Avenue, the Rudin family’s Greenwich Lane and others offer more value per square foot for buyers, brokers said.
At 15 Leonard Street, …
by Riccardo Ravasini 
A Queens-based developer who bought a prime Long Island City site for $8 million three years ago flipped the property for nearly six times that amount.
Developer Steve Cheung closed earlier this month on the $46.3 million sale of the site at 29-37 41st Avenue in the Queens Plaza section of Long Island City.
The buyer is an unidentified institutional investor. The site has a buildable square footage of roughly 205,000 square feet and comes with approvals for a 30-story …
by Riccardo Ravasini Foreigners invested more than $600 million in outer-borough real estate through the first half of the year, the most ever, according to data from Real Capital Analytics. Brooklyn received the vast majority of that speculation.
Still it’s easier to find investors from abroad for Manhattan, less so for Brooklyn, the Bronx and Queens. But those areas have great fundamentals.
These days, average rents in Brooklyn are basically at Manhattan levels, and there seems to be no ceiling in sight for …
by Riccardo Ravasini According to an October 20 report in state-run China Economic Weekly, Miami is being cited as the future mecca for Chinese home buyers and real estate investors. Miami homes cost only 40 percent of those in Beijing, the report argues. The only reason Chinese buyers have overlooked Miami in the past is that Chinese buyers and investors simply didn’t associate Miami with real estate in the same way that they do San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The tide …
by Riccardo Ravasini