After 20 Years Selling Miami Beach, One Block Keeps Calling Me Back

In 20 years of selling Miami Beach, I've walked clients through every neighborhood worth walking. La Gorce. Sunset Islands. Hibiscus. Palm. North Bay Road. The Venetians. Oceanfront blocks from 15th Street to 75th. I know where the light is good at 5pm. Which corners hold value and which ones don't. Which streets have the canopy you feel before you see.

If you asked me which Miami Beach block I'd put my own money on, I already have. 2880 Fairgreen Drive — a 13,900 square foot corner lot in Mid Beach.

But this wasn't my first crack at Fairgreen.

Antonio — my pest control guy — came to me one day in 2018 and told me he knew an older couple on Fairgreen who were thinking about selling. Quietly. No sign, no MLS, no agent. The kind of hand-to-hand lead you only get when the people who take care of you at home feel how deep and far your relationship has come.

I wrote an offer. And then I stalled.

Life happens. Work happens.

I needed to speak to my bank to finance the deal, but then I started to second-guess myself. Can I cover the nut of this property on top of everything else I already cover?

Pressure from the seller. Then a client found out I'd made the offer — the seller had reached out to him direct — and he was upset I didn't bring him the deal first.

Time to get out... Or was it?

Antonio, seeing I hadn't closed the deal, decided to take the property to another agent. Before you knew it, just as fast as it came, it was sold. I sputtered. They closed.

I thought about it a lot until I finally let it go. And like you do in all things that don't come to fruition, I wished the new owner the best of luck.

I made myself a promise that day. The next Fairgreen opportunity that came around, I was taking it.

The History Miami Beach Keeps to Itself

Here's a fact almost nobody outside the neighborhood knows. Mid Beach wasn't built the way the rest of Miami Beach was built.

When Carl Fisher reclaimed Miami Beach from mangrove in the 1910s and 1920s, most of the island got scraped flat and filled fast — subdivided for tourists and hotel developers who needed inventory quickly. Mid Beach went a different direction. It was laid out around the 1923 Bay Shore Golf Course — now the Miami Beach Golf Club — and planned for residents, not visitors. Fairgreen Drive sits in the heart of that subdivision, framed by the course the neighborhood was built around.

The canopy on Fairgreen and W 28th is dense enough to shade the street curb to curb. It's the kind of block where people actually walk.

The eastern edge of the neighborhood has a second story most people miss. What's now Bayshore Park was the Miami Beach Par 3 Golf Course from 1961 until 2015, designed by Bruce Devlin. Before that, it was the northern end of Fisher's original 1923 Bay Shore course. So the 19.4 acres directly east of Fairgreen have been green for over a hundred years — fairway, then par 3, and now a brand-new park with walking trails, a lake overlook, tennis courts, an outdoor amphitheater, and a dog park.

That means the neighborhood has a permanent green buffer on both sides: the Miami Beach Golf Club on the west, and Bayshore Park on the east. Neither is ever going to be built on — the land has been dedicated to recreation since Carl Fisher drew up the original plats. Combine the two, and you get something almost no Miami Beach block has: the feeling of being enclosed by green, not by fence.

The Case for Canopy Over Everything

Every Miami Beach neighborhood is the right answer for someone. I've done deals on all of them and I can tell you honestly what each one does best.

Mid Beach, specifically Fairgreen Drive, gives you something different. Mid Beach gives you a neighborhood. You can walk your dog. You recognize your neighbors. You know which corner gets the best sunset. The scale is sized for living, not performance. The canopy is old enough to feel earned. Location and walkability is what it's about — especially south of 41st Street (Arthur Godfrey Rd). Walk to the ocean using the pedestrian walkover bridge at 29th and Flamingo Drive. Take Chase Avenue on a scenic route adjacent to the Miami Beach Golf Course, cross Alton to Lower North Bay Road, and walk the Sunset Islands or Sunset Harbor. Frequent the beautiful new Bayshore Park. Take Prairie Avenue all the way down to Lincoln Road.

It's nice to live on the Miami Beach Golf Course on Prairie Avenue, but I too can walk the Golf Course anytime I want with my dog loose after hours — along with anyone else who wants to do the same. Your yard on Prairie loses some mystique, and definitely some privacy, when the whole city can walk right up to your backyard and wave hello.

“I love every one of these neighborhoods — I've done deals on all of them. But when I close my eyes and picture the kind of block I'd spend the next twenty years on, it's always Fairgreen.”

— David Solomon

The Math on Buildable Land in Mid Beach

Mid Beach is small. Fewer than 100 residential blocks, bounded by Dade Boulevard, Pine Tree Drive, the Miami Beach Golf Club, and 41st Street. Corner lots and golf-front lots number in the dozens.

Let me show you the math through one lot I was personally involved in.

2924 Prairie Avenue. 14,600 SF directly on the Miami Beach Golf Club, western exposure, sunset views.

In June 2015, Todd Glaser, Charlie Ratner, and Fred Karlton bought it off-market for $1.7 million through a partnership. The house on it was an old yellow box with illegal additions — vacant for years, falling apart. They weren't buying a house. They were buying the land underneath it.

In 2018 the dry-side modern market was soft. Nobody was rushing to build non-waterfront spec. Glaser and his partners decided not to develop. I listed it for them, and on April 16, 2018 it closed at $1,975,000 to a buyer whose agent had my exact same birthday. Different year, of course. I walked the buyer through the damp house — debris on ground, termite droppings, visible leaks everywhere. I did what I do. The deal closed, obviously.

Then the buyer did nothing. From 2018 to 2024, that yellow house stayed exactly where it was, in exactly the same condition. Six years of the neighborhood re-pricing around it.

Around the end of 2023 I brought two buyers for it — one was wasting my time and the other was just wasting his. Both made offers, but in January 2024, 2924 Prairie sold again. **$4.3 million.** Guess who bought it. Todd Glaser — alone, or with partners. I wasn't involved in the purchase. Another long story — one day I might decide to tell it.

Four months later, in May 2024, Todd sold it again. **$4,950,000.** No renovation. No plans. No new construction. The same yellow house, still sitting there. He made $650,000 in four months on a property he once sold at $1.975M.

Same lot. Same view. Same old house. June 2015 to May 2024: $1.7M to $4.95M. Nearly 3x on a dry-side Mid Beach lot in under a decade.

That's my comp.

2924 Prairie is 14,600 SF with a teardown sitting on it, and it sold in May 2024 at $4,950,000.

2880 Fairgreen is 13,900 square feet on a corner, cleared and ready, with Touzet Studio plans included, at $4,950,000.

One street over. Nearly two years later. You do the math.

The One I Took

2880 Fairgreen Drive came to me and I didn't hesitate.

The first time I stood on the corner of W 29th and Fairgreen in 2025, after I had put it under contract, I had a coffee in one hand and my cell phone in the other. I heard nothing. I smelled the trees before I looked up and saw the canopy. Two people walked by with a dog. Nobody honked. A delivery truck turned at the corner and I thought — you could actually live on this street without living inside the noise of Miami Beach.

That's when I called Carlos at Touzet Studio.

“Carlos, I need you to meet me at this great lot on Fairgreen I'm going to buy.”

— David Solomon

13,900 square feet. Corner lot, 100 feet by 139 feet, at the intersection of W 29th and Fairgreen. I wrote the offer. I closed it. I demolished the 1933 house that had been sitting there since before my parents were born. I salvaged the Dade County pine from the framing so it could be reused in whatever gets built next. I brought in Touzet Studio — the firm behind $75M OKTO on La Gorce, $38.5M 6396 North Bay Road, and the tower at The Setai — to design the home that belongs on this corner.

I told the full story of the teardown and the Touzet design in [another post you can read here](/blog/fairgreen-drive).

A buyer here gets the lot, the permitted plans, and a head start on a home most buyers wait two years to begin. That's the rare version of this deal — land already cleared, design already done, and a Touzet Studio set you can build on.

The promise I made in 2018 — I kept it.

If You're Thinking About Mid Beach

If you've been looking in Miami Beach and nothing has quite felt like a home instead of an address — walk Mid Beach. Come at 8am on a weekday. Start on Prairie, turn down W 29th, and walk slowly. See what I mean about the canopy.

If you want to talk about 2880 Fairgreen specifically — the lot, the plans, the full development package — I'm happy to show you. Reach out anytime.

— David Hunt Solomon