DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT: MIAMI LUXURY CONDO BOARD & DEVELOPER GET INTO $1.5M VALET PARKING SQUABBLE

$1.5 million valet parking dispute pits Miami luxury condo board against developer

BY NICHOLAS NEHAMAS

nnehamas@MiamiHerald.com

In Miami’s surging real estate market, even the price of parking has hit overdrive.

Residents of a downtown luxury condo have been told they must cough up $1.5 million for the 50 parking spots they’ve used for valet parking — for free — since the building opened in 2008.

That’s $30,000 per spot, or $196 per square foot of parking, assuming the spaces are the minimum size mandated by city code. The average home in Miami-Dade County sells for $175 per square foot, according to real estate website Trulia.

Unit owners at the building, a 40-story tower on Biscayne Boulevard at Third Street called Met One, aren’t happy about telling Mom and Dad to park somewhere else if they want to come visit.

“Needless to say the board and unit owners expected that upon purchasing their units they would forever and always have the ability to have valet parking,” said Eric Glazer, an attorney for the condo association.

Developer MDM Group has already turned the building, which has 447 units, over to the association. But MDM still owns 50 guest parking spaces in the building’s garage. If buying the spots strikes residents as a bad deal, MDM principals Ricardo Glas and Luis Pulenta have also offered to rent them out for a total of $10,000 per month.

But neither option appeals to the condo association.

“We do not have these funds in the budget,” Met One’s property manager told unit owners in an email last week. “The only solution would be a special assessment, which would need to be voted on. … That process would last several months and would not be fair to the property residents — assuming that the vote could even be obtained.”

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