Gregory D'Elia has lived at Portofino South for fifteen years, the last fourteen of them on the condo board. When a $202 million offer landed on the association's desk for the 140-unit building last winter, he turned it down without much hesitation. "Why would I?" he told the Palm Beach Post. "This is a jewel of a building, and a lot of other owners feel the same way. They want to stay."
A few blocks away, an investor named Joey Columbo had made the opposite bet years earlier, and it had already paid off many times over.
That contradiction sits at the center of what's happening along Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach right now. The same Florida law written to protect condo owners after the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside has turned some of the oldest, most assessment-burdened buildings on the waterfront into the most sought-after acquisition targets the city has seen. If you're weighing an older Flagler Drive unit against a new-construction tower this year, the special assessment on the seller's disclosure might not mean what you assume it means.
Why the assessments got this large
Florida now requires condo and co-op buildings three stories or taller to complete milestone structural inspections, generally at 30 years of age or 25 years if the building sits within three miles of the coast, along with a Structural Integrity Reserve Study covering major components like roofs, waterproofing, and concrete. Boards can no longer vote to waive or underfund those reserves the way many did for decades. The Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation lays out the specifics, and the practical effect on 1970s and 1980s waterfront buildings has been steep.
At Portofino South, a 1971 building at 3800 Washington Road across the Intracoastal from Mar-a-Lago, owners had already spent $12 million on safety and engineering upgrades including fire sprinklers before the buyout offer arrived, and more work was expected. Annual maintenance fees top $20,000 for many owners in the building. One resident, Jack Buyarski, said his personal share of the assessment work came to about $100,000.
That is the story most condo guides stop at: old building, new law, painful bill. It is not the whole story on this stretch of waterfront.
The number that flips the math: 95 percent
Florida law allows a condominium association to terminate itself and force a sale of the entire building with approval from roughly 95 percent of unit owners. At Portofino South, that threshold meant if just seven of the building's 140 owners rejected the offer, the deal would collapse under state law. That is a fundamentally different vote than an ordinary real estate closing, where a single owner can hold out indefinitely. It converts a slow-moving reserve funding problem into something closer to a forced sale, controlled by a supermajority rather than any individual holdout, and it is exactly the mechanism developers have needed to make aging, assessment-heavy buildings pencil as land deals rather than liabilities.
The corridor's price sheet looks like a bidding war, not a market in trouble
| Building | Address | Built | Units | Deal | Buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portofino South | 3800 Washington Road | 1971 | 140 | $202M offer in January 2026, later folded into a $430M two-building bid at a $250M minimum for Portofino alone | Immocorp Capital / BEKO Equities |
| Flagler Yacht Club | 3701 South Flagler Drive | 1981 | 39 | $150M to $180M, part of the same $430M package | BEKO Equities |
| Harbor Towers | 3901 South Flagler Drive | — | 61, across two buildings on 2 acres | About $100M, closed February 2026 after litigation | Fort Partners (Nadim Ashi) |
| Southbridge | 3915 South Flagler Drive | 1980s | — | $25.4M, closed February 2026 | Related Ross (Stephen Ross) |
| Flagler House | 3705 South Flagler Drive | 1985 | 38 | $37.6M, now being replaced by the Maison d'Or project | Kolter Group / Perko Development Partners |
The pattern holds across every deal on that list: the payout has nothing to do with what the units would fetch to another homebuyer and everything to do with what the dirt underneath them is worth to a developer. At Portofino South, the average buyout works out to about $1.4 million per unit, which broker Alexis Waller, who has sold 30 units in the building, described in the Palm Beach Post as roughly double fair market value, even as new towers a few blocks away sell for $5 million to $10 million a unit. At Flagler House, the Palm Beach County Property Appraiser had most units valued under $200,000, according to The Real Deal, while the buyout paid owners between $850,000 and $1.8 million apiece.
Flagler House sits on a 1.4-acre parcel wedged directly between Portofino South and Flagler Yacht Club. The building that used to occupy the middle of that block is already gone. What replaces it, and what happens to its two much larger neighbors, will likely define the shape of this stretch of Flagler Drive for the next decade.
What one owner's math actually looked like
Columbo's story shows how this played out at the individual level rather than the building level. Between 2021 and 2023, he bought eight units at Southbridge for a combined $1.6 million and joined four partners to acquire 19 more units for a combined $4.2 million, betting that a developer would eventually come calling. Four years later, he sold his eight units for a combined $6.4 million, and the joint venture sold its 19 units for $19 million to Related Ross, according to The Real Deal. He put the shift in plain terms: "It's kind of the new gold coast of West Palm. The views are amazing."
Jessica Julian, the Douglas Elliman broker who represented Nadim Ashi in the Harbor Towers deal, described the same dynamic from the developer side, telling The Real Deal that competitors "think that strip is going to be the new Billionaires' Row."
What this means if you're comparing an old unit to a new tower right now
A lower price tag on an older Flagler Drive condo is not automatically a bargain, and it is not automatically a trap. It depends on what you're actually buying. A few questions are worth asking before you write an offer, whether you plan to live there or you're weighing the building purely as an investment:
- Has the building already fielded developer interest? Boards sometimes know this well before any public offer, since these conversations often start quietly.
- How does the monthly assessment compare to what an equivalent new unit would cost to carry? A large mismatch between dues and unit value on deep waterfront frontage is often exactly what a developer is pricing when they calculate a bid.
- What does your specific declaration require for termination? The statewide floor is roughly 95 percent, but your building's governing documents are the actual source of truth.
- How much timeline risk are you comfortable with? Harbor Towers only closed after a legal fight between Ashi and Stephen Ross played out in court, and a similar holdout dispute over the Biscayne 21 site in Miami has kept that redevelopment tied up for years, according to The Real Deal.
- Are you buying to live there for a decade, or underwriting a shorter-term buyout scenario? Both are legitimate reasons to buy on Flagler Drive right now, but they call for different due diligence.
D'Elia's resistance at Portofino South is a useful reminder that none of this is guaranteed. His board maintains the building passed every required inspection and that its recent capital work was proactive, not a response to any structural finding. A buyout offer is a real estate decision about scarce land, not a verdict on whether a building is safe or well run, and plenty of owners along this corridor may simply keep paying their dues and never get a call.
FAQ
Can a Florida condo association really force an owner to sell? Under Florida law, a condominium can terminate itself and require a sale of the entire building with approval from roughly 95 percent of unit owners. At Portofino South, that meant as few as seven owners out of 140 could have blocked the deal, which shows how a small minority can matter enormously, but only up to a point.
Does a big buyout offer mean my building is unsafe or in violation of the new inspection laws? Not necessarily. Portofino South's board has said the building passed its milestone inspection and that its capital improvements were planned in advance rather than forced by a failed inspection. A buyout offer reflects what a developer believes the land is worth, which is a separate question from whether the building itself is sound.
If you're trying to figure out whether a specific Flagler Drive building is a long-term home or sitting on land a developer already has an eye on, that's exactly the kind of building-by-building homework worth doing before you make an offer, not after. Isaias Franco works this corridor regularly and can pull a building's assessment history, reserve funding status, and recent sales alongside you. Request a free home valuation to start the conversation with real numbers in hand.
