Miami Developers Keep Raising The Stakes In The Amenities Race. Renters May Pay The Price

With tens of thousands of luxury apartments opening across South Florida and competing for the same tenants, rooftop pools and tricked-out fitness centers are the standard — and not enough to fill up a building.

Virtual DJs, private event spaces, wine storage and karaoke rooms are all on the menu for developers looking to stand out from the crowd. But high interest rates and construction costs and flattening rents present a math problem for lavish freebies.

“We have to look at amenities as a luxury product, but we also have to be financially responsible to see how we can build that in so that people will enjoy it, but also pay for it,” Cymbal DLT Cos. CEO Hector Delatorres said Tuesday at Bisnow’s Multifamily Summit in Dania Beach.

Luxe amenities differentiate projects among the thousands of apartment units set to deliver over the next two years, but they are also an opportunity to counteract the downward pressure on rent as a result of oversupply, panelists said.

“Converting the amenities to a profit center, and I'm not talking about a lot of money, but at least it's not costing money,” Delatorres said onstage at the Design Center of the Americas. “Because the problem with developers is you build the amenity, but you don't get paid for it. You can only get so much rent.”

Cymbal DLT, which delivered the 341-unit Laguna Gardens in Miami Gardens earlier this year, is planning a 598-unit, 35-story multifamily tower in Midtown Miami. 

Delatorres said new plans for a multifamily project include a market in the lobby powered by artificial intelligence, allowing tenants to access last-minute items like milk, butter, wine or beer. 

“The lobby mart is now a profit center,” he said. “The event space is now a profit center.” 

The concept of luxury is shifting from large units to lush amenities, Delatorres said, which allows developers to shrink unit sizes and boost price per square foot. As rents are softening and construction costs are climbing nationally, developers who are still looking to build need to find ways to juice revenue. 

Developers are spending more to charge more, which is almost necessary in a market where rent has decreased by almost 6% over the past year, according to an October Zumper report.

Bazbaz Development, which is planning a 37-story, 364-apartment Live Local Act project in Wynwood Norte, is spending double on amenities now compared to five or six years ago, Chief Operating Officer Albert Price said.

Out-of-the-box features, like a robotic pool service arm or a virtual DJ that plays music on the weekends, can be enough to charge an extra $50 a month, he said.

“A lot of developers who don't do it find themselves offering three months to $1K to move in [tenants],” Price said.

Miami apartment owners are offering on average six weeks of free rent, according to RealPage rental housing economist Jay Parsons, and Florida markets make up nearly half of the 20 cities with the highest rates of concessions.

Parsons wrote that Florida, like many markets with high concession volumes, struggles with low rent-to-income ratios despite strong absorption trends, but “supply volumes are significant, creating heavy competition for leases.”

In Miami alone, more than 15,000 apartments have hit the market this year, Multifamily Dive reported, putting it among the 10 most active cities for deliveries nationwide.

More is set to come. As of August, Miami-Dade had more than 23,000 units under construction, Fort Lauderdale had nearly 10,000 units under construction, and Palm Beach had just over 3,000 units under construction, according to Cushman & Wakefield data analyzed by Miami Realtors.

“What makes me nervous is that there’s so many submarkets — I’m thinking of downtown Fort Lauderdale … and definitely Downtown Miami — there's just thousands of communities that are still waiting to be delivered into an already concessionary environment,” FCP Senior Vice President Bruce Gago said. “Makes me very nervous.”

The supply cliff is looming, causing construction starts to drop 27% nationally since 2024, hitting a decade low in the U.S., according to an August report by RealPage.

But in Miami, apartment construction surged over the summer, with 7,257 units permitted between July 2024 and 2025, more than any other place tracked by RealPage in its analysis of Census Bureau data.

Investors are growing increasingly wary of the region's multifamily market — a national dynamic as they seek less risk and more guarantee on returns — causing equity to dry up.

The dynamic has made it hard to justify new developments, causing many investors to lean toward buying apartments rather than building, with sales of multifamily properties up 13% year-over-year, Multifamily Dive reported.

Buyers can pick up new or nearly new developments at a 20% discount compared to what it would cost to replace them today, Gago said.

“As long as that remains true, I'm going to be very pessimistic on most new development,” he said.