Miami is Becomming Miamihattan – the Manhattan of the South

Miami is the New Manhattan. According to Paul Silverstein, President of the Florida Commercial Team, Miami is in the process of becoming the Manhattan of the South! “Forget about the phrase World Class City,” Mr. Silverstein said. “Miamihattan is the newest buzzword for Miami, which has gone through more boom/bust cycles than Donald Trump has gone through wives. But that is in the past, and it won’t be repeated in Miamihattan.”

What is most extraordinary is that this transformation, going on right under the noses of its citizenry, is happening at lightning speed. In the next five years Miamihattan will literally double in size. That’s right – double in size. This has only happened to cities in the past where boom-towns were based upon the discovery of oil or gold.

And that is what has finally been discovered here; only Miami’s treasure is not oil or gold: its Real Estate. Hundreds of thousands of South Americans are investing their money in this stable, beautiful city, just in case their homelands become, or already are, unstable.

Europeans see phenomenal investment opportunities. Canadians see warm weather. Even Asian monies are now flowing into Miamihattan. Everyone wants a piece of the coral rock.

This explosion will be most notable when the Port of Miami dredging project begins to reel in cargo ships the size of skyscrapers from the expanded Panama Canal in the next couple of years. It will be noticed when the major expansion of every major expressway has doubled in size. It will be noticed when the tunnel allowing freight to be hauled under Biscayne Bay on its way to the South and Northeast is completed. It will be noticed when millions of square feet that are now only footprints on coral rock rise to 500 and 700 foot high towers of residential, office and retail projects.

And this growth spurt, this yeast like expansion, has affected not just the Downtown core. It has spilled over into cities miles away, pushing up real estate prices past the great real estate boom of 2000-2004. But this expansion and growth is fundamentally different. This growth is not governed by mortgage rates or economic cycles but by enormous amounts of cash. Mr. Silverstein noted that “buckets and buckets of cash have been and continue flowing into Miamihattan, the hottest city in the USA.”

When virtually every commercial transaction in Miami, and the majority of residential transactions, are paid for with cash, the likelihood by naysayers of a real estate crash becomes most unlikely. The past, in this particular case, is not a prologue of the future.

Mr. Silverstein is extremely optimistic about the city’s future. “Like the Manhattan to our north, it appears that this doubling in size will just be the beginning of a multi-year, multi-decade of developmental growth and progress the likes of which this sleepy little tourist town, formerly known as Miami, has never seen before,” he said. “It’s time to get a piece of this commercial real estate rock before you can’t even afford the sand.”