Hurricane Irma can’t scare away buyer of this $9 million waterfront home

An Ecuadorean buyer has plunked down a cool $9 million for a 5,600-square-foot waterfront home at 16 W. Dilido Drive on Miami Beach — the priciest single-family home sale in Miami-Dade County since Hurricane Irma grazed the region on Sept. 10.

“People are paying premiums on land to live on the Venetian Islands,” said Realtor Dora Puig of Luxe Living Realty, who represented the buyer. “Even after the hurricane scare, deals are closing. People are not running away.”

Realtor Lourdes Luaces of Arch Realty represented the sellers, Olivier and Marlen Caudron, in the off-market transaction. Their asking price was $11 million.

The house was last sold in 1999 for $930,000.

The four-bedroom, five-bathroom home was built in 1941 and sits on a 16,700-square foot lot. The sales price averages at $540 per square foot. Average land-value price for waterfront homes on the Islands is $450-$500 per square foot.

It’s too soon to tell what kind of long-term effect Hurricane Irma will have on local real estate. The power outages and utility service interruptions that plagued the area after the storm mean monthly sales and pricing reports won’t be back to normal until the end of October.

According to Jonathan Miller, president/CEO of New York-based consulting firm Miller Samuel Inc., 337 single-family homes have sold in Miami-Dade coastal communities (Aventura, Bal Harbour, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and Miami Beach) since Sept. 11, the day after Hurricane Irma.

There were 621 sales over the same period in 2016 — a drop of 45.7 percent.

“This is what you would expect, because the market had to slow down during and after the storm,” Miller said. “Yes, these sales were already under contract before Irma, but closings were delayed several months after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. This kind of sales activity shows real estate continues to move.”

Miller says the $9 million sale isn’t an outlier, either. Three other luxury single-family homes have sold since Irma, including two in Coconut Grove (for $7.55 million and $7.5 million) and another in Coral Gables ($5 million).

Puig, who handled another sale on the Venetian Islands earlier this year that set a 12-month record, says she hasn’t seen any reluctance from buyers to invest in coastal properties despite the Irma scare. She has, however, seen sellers adjust their asking prices as a way of stimulating the oversupplied luxury condo market.

“The whole coastal line of Florida is a flood zone,” she said. “If you go by that theory, there should be no one living in Key West. I’ve had about four or five big price reductions in the last two weeks, but those were people who had overpriced their properties. No one is dropping their prices by 40 percent.”

This story was originally published October 6, 2017 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Hurricane Irma can’t scare away buyer of this $9 million waterfront home."