It’s no secret that foreign investors fuel South Florida’s condo market, but a new report shows how international buyers now dominate new development sales in submarkets with significant pipelines.
Across 66 condo projects in the tri-county region, foreign buyers make up 52 percent of total sales, according to a report by the Miami Association of Realtors. The report covers sales data for the 22-month period from January of last year through October of this year. The Miami Association of Realtors partnered with the brokerages Fortune Christie’s International Real Estate, Cervera Real Estate, ISG World, PMG, Serhant New Development and One Sotheby’s International Realty to obtain the data. It expands upon a July report that covered foreign buyer deals from January 2024 to June 2025.
The latest report found that 6,931 units were presold in the latest 22-month period, and 3,620 of the presales were from foreign buyers. Latin American buyers made up 86 percent of foreign buyers during that period. The top countries represented by foreign purchases were Colombia, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and Turkey.
The report also shows foreign buyers particularly have come to dominate new development markets. In Miami’s Brickell and Coconut Grove, foreign buyers accounted for 63 percent of sales; in North Miami, 59 percent of sales; in Miami’s Wynwood, 63 percent of sales; in Hollywood, 76 percent of sales; and in Pompano Beach, 63 percent of sales.
While foreign buyers reigned supreme in those markets, they represented a much smaller share of sales in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. Just 13 percent of Fort Lauderdale’s reported sales involved foreign buyers, and in West Palm Beach that share dropped to 7 percent.
At The Real Deal’s Miami Real Estate Forum last week, Fortune International Group’s Edgardo Defortuna and ISG World’s Craig Studnicky discussed the shifting behavior of international buyers in South Florida. Also, they said the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has not deterred foreign buyers, rather, they have rushed to invest though the EB-5 visa program.
“Demand has been incredible,” Defortuna said. “Before, EB-5 used to be mainly Chinese or the Far East, but now the Latin American buyer really understands the process.”
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