PMG is jumping back into the cryptocurrency buyer pool via a collaboration with Shift4, a payment processing company.
Miami-based PMG is offering the option to buyers across all of its Florida condo projects, including Waldorf Astoria Residences in Miami and St. Petersburg; E11even Club Residences Beyond; 38 West Eleventh Residences Miami; One Twenty Brickell Residences and Sage Intracoastal Residences Fort Lauderdale.
Ryan Shear, managing partner at PMG, said that buyers recently have been making requests for this kind of cryptocurrency conversion. Shear said the arrangement is months in the making.
“We feel there’s a lot of people who own crypto who want to buy real estate,” he said. “We wanted to make sure it’s safe and secure.”
Many developers can’t accept cryptocurrency because their lenders or investors don’t allow it. Similarly to selling stock to make a real estate investment or other purchase, crypto investors can convert their coin to cash on their own.
PMG won’t accept cryptocurrency. Instead, Shift4 will convert a buyer’s crypto to U.S. dollars. Interested buyers will complete an addendum to their contract and Know Your Customer verification through Shift4. From there, they will be able to make payments to the developer.
Shift4 and other platforms allow investors to pay from their crypto wallets. Tether, a stablecoin known as USDT, is on par with the dollar. One bitcoin is valued at about $106,000 today.
Shear said this could appeal to foreign investors who are restricted by banking regulations in their home countries.
PMG is one of the most active condo developers in Miami’s urban core. The company recently scored a $413 million construction loan for One Twenty Brickell Residences, a planned two-tower development in Brickell, just weeks after the developer and its partners landed a $215 million construction loan for a nearby project, 38 West Eleventh Residences Miami.
Buyers at PMG’s projects could previously convert crypto to cash via a similar deal with Sam Bankman-Fried’s now defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX. That fell apart in late 2022 when FTX collapsed.
Few crypto-to-crypto real estate deals have been publicly reported in South Florida. In 2018, crypto investor Michael Komaransky sold his Miami home nearly entirely in Bitcoin for about $6 million, or what came out to roughly 455 Bitcoin at the time.
At Arte, a luxury condo building in Surfside developed by Alex Sapir and his partner, Giovanni Fasciano, a crypto buyer paid $22.5 million for a penthouse in 2021. It’s unknown if the developer converted the digital currency into dollars. The following year, the owner, Chain, a Caribbean company that builds blockchain-based fintech and Web3 cloud services, sold the unit at a loss for $18 million.
