The latest in a local spurt of boutique condo developments is coming to a quiet neighborhood on the northern end of Fort Lauderdale’s barrier island. An 18-story condominium with 44 units will replace a two-story co-op with 16 units built in the late 1950s on the west side of the Intracoastal Waterway across from the historic Bonnet House Museum & Gardens.
Property Markets Group (PMG) is developing the condominium, called Sage Intracoastal Residences Fort Lauderdale. Asking prices for units started just above $3 million in July, up from $2.9 million in mid-April, when preconstruction sales began. “The more we sell, we inch it up,” Ryan Shear, managing partner of PMG, said in July after his company presold five of the 44 units. The Sage condos will be two- and three-bedroom units with 10-foot ceilings, ranging from 2,754 to 3,185 square feet. “We’re working on our sixth contract now,” Shear said in a July 9 interview. “We’re on pace to be 30, 40, maybe 50 percent sold by the end of the year.”
Property Markets Group, a full-service real estate colossus with offices in New York and Miami, is known in Fort Lauderdale for developing Society Las Olas, a mixed-use property with 639 apartments downtown at 301 SW First Ave.
“We have done rentals here. We have yet to do condos. This is our first condo,” Shear said of the Sage Intracoastal development. Designed by Fort Lauderdale-based FSMY Architects, the planned condo is a rare small-scale PMG project. “We don’t often do projects that are 44 units,” Shear said. “Most of our projects are hundreds and hundreds of units.”
PMG introduced its wellness-centric Sage brand on Florida’s west coast, where it built Sage Longboat Key Residences in 2022. Strong demand for the 16-unit cluster of condos on the Gulf of Mexico, whose unit prices started around $4.5 million, encouraged PMG to develop condos under the Sage brand in Fort Lauderdale, too.
To that end, Sage Intracoastal Residences Fort Lauderdale will feature a spa with cold plunges and steam, sauna and treatment rooms, as well as a fitness studio, movement studio and yoga lawn. Just south of East Sunrise Boulevard and less than a half-mile from the Galleria shopping mall, the Sage-branded condominium planned for Intracoastal Drive will have a doorman and a 24-hour front desk concierge. The building also will offer residents such services as a private residential porte cochere with 24-hour valet service, house bicycles, sports equipment storage, package delivery and dog walking services. Sage is designed with a semi-private elevator and a private elevator foyer for each residence, together with more than 19,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities, including a waterfront swimming pool with a café, lounge and private cabana suites.
The condo building’s best amenity will arguably be an expansive view of the Atlantic Ocean, unobstructed by the low-rise Bonnett House to the east across the Intracoastal Waterway. The co-op now occupying that site, named after its address at 900 Intracoastal Drive, still belongs to residents of the building’s 16 units. Shear said the residents agreed to sell the building to PMG after about six months of talks and negotiations. “We’ll close in October,” he said.
Shear declined to specify how much PMG will pay for 900 Intracoastal Drive. But many of the co-op residents will apparently receive much more than the purchase price of their units. According to Broward County property records, most of the units were purchased in the 1980s and 1990s at prices ranging from $55,000 to $110,000. The highest purchase price on record for one of the 900 Intracoastal co-op units is $301,000 in 2017. PMG agreed to pay more than $4.8 million for the co-op building, an average of $300,000 per unit, Shear said.
The pending sale and demolition of the aging co-op building may have stemmed, in part, from increased regulation of condos and co-ops to ensure their structural integrity following the deadly collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium in the Miami suburb of Surfside in 2021. “I’m sure that’s a piece of it, but from what I understand, this co-op has been looking to sell for a while. I believe there was a contract on it prior. I don’t know the full history of it,” Shear said. “But I don’t think that [increased regulation] was the sole factor driving it.”
Rival projects are underway around town. Sage Intracoastal is one of multiple condo projects in Fort Lauderdale, including several boutique developments with fewer than 100 planned units. Not far from the Sage site, for example, another boutique condominium is planned in the north beach area of Fort Lauderdale’s barrier island. Key Biscayne-based Latitude Group is developing a 10-story, 22-unit condominium called The Terraces at 527 Orton Ave., about a mile south of Birch Park. In downtown Fort Lauderdale, Miami-based Related Group is developing a 163-unit condominium at 521 East Las Olas Blvd. called Andare Residences by Pininfarina. Just south of the New River in the downtown area, locally based developer Jean Francois Roy is replacing the three-story, 30-unit Edgewater House condominium at 501 SE Sixth Ave., built in 1980, with an eight-story, 94-unit condo building called Sixth & Rio.
Construction of Sage Intracoastal probably will start in the spring of 2025 and conclude sometime in 2027. Shear said the market for new condos in Fort Lauderdale is competitive, but not crowded with development. “Not too much, not like Miami, where there’s a lot more product,” he said in July. “We’re off-season right now. The [condo selling] season really starts in September. I think we’ll go into the season 20 or 25 percent sold … It’s going as well as we could have asked for.”
