Downtown Miami tower to offer home sharing
Condo owners looking to rent out their high-rise units will get their chance when Newgard Development Group builds a 48-story tower designed for Airbnbstyled home sharing in downtown Miami.
The project will contain 604 units, with 400 of them reserved for condo owners. The balance will be controlled by NGD Homesharing, and run as hotel rooms. Prices will start at $300,000, topping out at $1.2 million for penthouse level dwellings, Harvey Hernandez, founder and CEO of NGD Homesharing, said Tuesday.
His Miami-based company announced a new brand called Natiivo. The proposed high-rise in Miami will be part of “Powered by Airbnb,” the home-sharing platform’s business for managing buildings. There also will be a tower in Austin, Texas, too.
In a telephone interview, Hernandez said he expects construction on the Miami tower to start in the first quarter of 2020, with an opening targeted for mid-2022. The Austin project is on a faster track, with its 249 units scheduled for opening in 2021.
“What we’re creating is the first-ever building designed and built for home sharing,” Hernandez said.
Many condo owners, he said, “come to the city on a regular basis” but are not year-round residents.
“They cannot justify the fact that [the unit] is empty … it is costing them money,” Hernandez said. “We are creating a product for that kind of buyer. We call it flexible ownership.”
The towers in both cities will include co-working spaces, hotel-styled food and beverage programs and digital locks for keyless entries.
Condo owners will be able to list their properties for rent through Natiivo or independently. They’d pay Natiivo 25 percent of the rental income and a 3 percent listing fee to Airbnb. All Natiivo units will have a hotel license provided by the city, which levies local taxes.
Natiivo “master hosts” will be on site offering concierge services designed to help residents and guests gain easy access to local restaurants and entertainment venues while expediting the check-in and checkout process.
Airbnb executive Tim Rathschmidt said Tuesday the company “has been exploring a few ways of how we can work with developers” on high-end services around the country. One such project is in New York, where 10 floors of a midtown Manhattan office building are being converted into residential suites.
Located at Northeast Sixth Street, the Miami project is slightly to the west of the historic Freedom Tower and to the north of Miami-Dade College. It is also within walking distance of the new Virgin Miami Central train station and the downtown Metromover.
Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, whose firm, Cervera Real Estate, is coordinating sales in Miami, said would-be buyers are already showing interest because of the price points and flexibility to rent out their units. The Airbnb name alone also is expected to help draw investors.
“Airbnb has a much broader reach,” she said. “It will be interesting to see how much more international this becomes. We don’t have to explain to people what Airbnb is.”
Cervera said a temporary sales gallery has been opened downtown and will be operating for the next four to six months.
“We’re there, we’re staffed and ready to roll,” she said.