In February 2026, a buyer was ready to sign for more than $200 million worth of residences at The Delmore, the Zaha Hadid-designed condominium rising on the former Champlain Towers South site at 8777 Collins Avenue. The deal did not close. Damac Properties' legal team could not verify where the buyer's funds originated, and the developer walked away rather than proceed. It was the second consecutive sales season the project had missed since launching in January 2025, and as of that month, The Delmore had not signed a single contract for any of its 37 planned residences.
If you have been watching Surfside real estate coverage, you have likely seen that fact repeated as a headline: the most architecturally significant building proposed for the site has zero buyers more than a year after opening its sales gallery. Most of that coverage treats the number as evidence that the market is squeamish about the address itself. The lost $200 million contract tells a more specific story. Buyers are not walking away from Surfside oceanfront. They are walking away from a deal that could not yet prove it was actually a deal, permits, insurance, and financing.
The Market Around It Isn't the Problem
Condo sales in Surfside rose 57 percent in the first quarter of 2026, according to a Corcoran Group report, while inventory fell 25 percent over the same period. The strength at the top of the market pulled the average condo sale price up 23 percent year over year, to $6.1 million. This is not a neighborhood where ultra-luxury buyers have gone quiet.
The transactions closing nearby make that plain. In March 2026, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz paid roughly $44 million, close to $8,000 per square foot, for a penthouse at the Four Seasons Residences at The Surf Club, a few hundred feet south of the Delmore site. A lower-level unit in the Surf Club's south tower later traded at $4,400 per square foot, a figure that beats the asking price of some newer buildings on the sand. Fendi Chateau Residences, the boutique 58-unit building two blocks from Bal Harbour, lists at an average of roughly $4,160 per square foot, and Arte by Antonio Citterio has traded around $5,207 per square foot. These are not distressed comparables. They are the active, closing market that surrounds a project with zero contracts.
That contrast is the whole point. If price per square foot explained The Delmore's stall, you would expect the entire top tier of Surfside to be soft. It isn't. Something specific to this one address is keeping buyers on the sidelines, and it is not the number on the price sheet.
What Actually Stopped the Sale
Damac's own executives have been unusually candid about what that something is. Jeffrey Rossely, senior vice president of development at Damac International, told The Real Deal in April 2026 that the company had rushed its initial launch, opening sales before the physical sales gallery was even complete, and had bet on market momentum that never materialized after the presidential inauguration. He also acknowledged that Damac, despite developing tens of thousands of units across the Middle East and London, had no prior track record building ultra-luxury residential product in the United States. "There's a degree of reasonable skepticism," he said, "so we needed to prove this was going to happen."
The deeper obstacle sits underneath that skepticism: insurance. Trade coverage of the project has reported that Damac has struggled to secure the more than $1.5 billion in construction insurance the project requires before vertical construction can proceed at full scale, a gap one insurance industry analysis attributed to the absence of an experienced domestic joint-venture partner with established South Florida carrier relationships. Residential for-sale construction, the same analysis noted, remains a restricted class in Florida's builder's risk market, with rates running two to five times higher than comparable commercial risk and underwriters weighting a developer's local loss history heavily. A Dubai-based firm making its first American residential project sits on the wrong side of every one of those underwriting questions.
Here is a way to see the difference in readiness at a glance:
| Readiness factor | The Delmore (as of mid-2026) | Four Seasons Residences at The Surf Club |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. ultra-luxury track record | First American project for the developer | Multiple completed towers by Fort Partners |
| Construction insurance | Still being secured | Long in place |
| Master building permit | Being resubmitted | Long finalized |
| General contractor | Not yet under contract | Under contract, delivered |
| Joint-venture partner | In active discussions | Not applicable |
| Confirmed sales | Zero, as of April 2026 | Multiple eight-figure closings in 2026 |
None of that table is about design or location. The Delmore's oceanfront frontage and Zaha Hadid pedigree are not in question. What is in question is whether the entity selling it can currently deliver a permitted, insured, contracted building, and buyers writing eight-figure checks are pricing that uncertainty into their decision to wait.
The Site Carries a Second Timeline
There is one more layer specific to this address that a purely financial reading misses. On August 6, 2026, Surfside commissioners gave final approval to a permanent memorial honoring the 98 people who died when Champlain Towers South collapsed on June 24, 2021. Construction is expected to begin soon near the Collins Avenue entrance to the site, and the design incorporates what the town is calling the 13 Pillars of Light, structures that embed rebar and debris recovered from the original building. That approval came less than three weeks before this article, and it means the memorial and The Delmore will be built essentially side by side, on adjoining ground, on the same stretch of oceanfront.
Rossely addressed that proximity directly in a June 2026 interview, saying the company had done what he called traditional due diligence on the physical property but, in his words, should have gone through "emotional due diligence as well." That is not a standard developer talking point, and it points to a second, quieter reason buyers have hesitated that sits alongside the financing gap: some purchasers simply do not want to be the first to move into a building next to an active grief site, regardless of what the building costs.
What This Means If You're Comparing Preconstruction Towers
The Delmore is an extreme case, but the underlying lesson applies to any preconstruction purchase in Surfside, Bal Harbour, or Bay Harbor Islands, where several new towers are moving through permitting and presale simultaneously. Before treating a glossy sales gallery as evidence a project will deliver, it is worth asking a short list of questions that have nothing to do with the renderings:
- Has the master building permit been issued, or only applied for? Those are different legal statuses, and the gap between them can run years.
- Is construction insurance actually placed, or still being negotiated?
- Is a general contractor under signed contract, or still being selected?
- Does the developer have a completed track record in this specific price band, in this specific market, or is this their first project here?
- What do the escrow terms say about when your deposit is released to the developer, and what happens to it if the completion date slips?
None of these questions require special access. They are the same questions Rossely himself has answered publicly about The Delmore, which is precisely why the project has become the most closely watched case study in South Florida's ultra-luxury segment right now. Damac has said it plans to relaunch sales toward the end of 2026, once a joint-venture partner is in place and the insurance and permitting questions are resolved. Whether that timeline holds will tell you more about the true state of Miami's top-tier condo market than the $6.1 million average sale price ever could.
If you are weighing a purchase anywhere along this stretch of coastline, from a resale unit at Fendi Chateau to a preconstruction reservation further north, the conversation is easier with someone who tracks these permitting and financing details as closely as the finishes. Allen Davoudpour and the team built their practice on exactly that kind of scrutiny. Schedule a consultation to talk through what a specific building's readiness actually looks like before you write a deposit check.
