Miami Brokers Look to New York in Search of Buyers

With Florida's real estate market reeling, brokers in Miami increasingly are targeting wealthy New Yorkers as a potential new audience to buy their unsold properties. The push to market to New Yorkers is ramping up as brokers rush to sell properties now on the South Florida market before a flood of new condominiums goes on sale later this year.

"I have three people from my sales team flying up to New York right now to meet with New York brokers and buyers," the president of Miami-based Fortune International Realty, Edgardo Defortuna, said.

Mr. Defortuna said his company is organizing a series of meetings this week in New York, including a cocktail party at the Hudson Hotel today to show Manhattan real estate brokers his firm's newest Miami projects.

With more than 22,000 condo units that need to be absorbed, supply in Miami has overwhelmed demand, and prices are being cut substantially. In contrast to New York City buyers, most of whom plan to live in their apartments, Miami investors bought up condominiums intending to flip them and were forced to cut prices when demand weakened.

"Florida is on sale right now," the president of Miami-based Majestic Properties, Jeff Morr, said. A few years ago, Mr. Defortuna said: "We almost didn't have to market to people. Now, the buyers are more scarce, and so we really have to go and show them why Miami is still a good investment."

So Miami real estate developers are catering to wealthy New Yorkers, betting that luxury properties will sell best. Eric Sheppard, the developer for Canyon Ranch Living, a new condominium complex on Miami Beach, said wealthy New Yorkers make up as much as 60% of his buyers.

New York is becoming an especially important place in the search for buyers, as demand among Florida residents has begun to dry up, a broker at Essinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors, Lucas Lechuga, said. "Pretty much all of my closings have been from out-of-state buyers."

Later this year, a large group of new condominium developments in downtown Miami will hit the market. People in the industry expect the new properties — largely grouped around Biscayne Boulevard and Brickell Avenue — to push real estate prices down further.

"A lot of inventory coming on the market will cause prices to stay level for a while, we predict from two to three years," said Craig Studnicky, the president of a Florida-based real estate sales and marketing organization, International Sales Group.

"New York is its own creature in terms of marketing: The buyers are sophisticated and intelligent and much better educated than people in other parts of the country," Mr. Sheppard said. "You market to them but you don't really have to push it because they can see what's going on. … When there's money to be made, they come down and get a good investment."