The Residences at 1428 Brickell

The Residences at 1428 Brickell is a 70-floor tower under construction at 1428 Brickell Avenue, with 195 units ranging from 1,800 to 4,000 square feet. Arquitectonica is the architect of record; ACPV Architects, the Milan-based firm of Antonio Citterio and Patricia Viel, is doing interiors. Completion is dated 2028.

The project is financed by a $565 million construction loan, with J.P. Morgan as senior lender and Sculptor Real Estate as junior lender. That is a real, recorded piece of capital stack information, which is more than can be said for most of the rest of this file.

The evidence supplied does not name a developer. The site itself has a documented ownership history — a decade of disputes among the Taplin family, a prior bidder named Shahab Karmely, and a neighboring owner — which appear to have been resolved by 2017 through what press coverage describes as an acquisition by an entity called Ytech. None of that is confirmed in the project record as the current developer of this tower, so we are not stating it as fact here. If you are told a developer name by a broker, ask them to point to where it is disclosed, because it is not in what we were given.

Sales percentage, price ceiling, and price per square foot are all unpublished. What exists today is a construction site, a loan, an architect, and a floor plan range.

Unit sizes span 1,800 to 4,000 square feet. Pricing starts at $4.4 million; no upper bound and no per-square-foot figure are published, so there is no way from this evidence to say whether a given unit is priced high or low against the building's own range.

The deposit schedule — how much is due at contract, at groundbreaking, at top-off — is not published. Nor is the escrow percentage the developer has committed to. Nor is HOA/association due amount per square foot. Nor is rental policy (minimum lease term, short-term rental restrictions). All four of these are standard disclosures in a Florida new-construction offering, and all four are absent from the evidence we have.

In practical terms: at this stage, a buyer is being asked to commit capital against a floor plan and a completion date, without visibility into the carrying costs or the payment mechanics that would normally accompany a purchase contract. That may simply reflect where the sales process currently stands — but it is the client's job to have those documents in hand before signing, not to take our word that they exist.

There is no developer track record in this evidence set — no count of delivered projects, no average delay history, no defect litigation record, no lender default history, no founding year. The track-record score sits at the category midpoint (5 of a possible range) specifically because there is nothing to weigh it against, not because performance has been judged adequate.

The litigation on file concerns the site itself, not a builder's construction record elsewhere. Between 2016 and 2017, the Taplin family (prior owners of the 10-story office building that stood on this address), a rival bidder named Shahab Karmely, and a neighboring property interest tied to Walter DeFortuna were involved in overlapping disputes over control of the property — an exclusivity dispute, a father-son dispute over rent, and a foreclosure-related dispute with a lender. Reporting cited in our evidence states these were resolved: the Karmely dispute was dismissed by all parties in October 2016 without a financial settlement, and the other disputes were reported settled or concluded through an acquisition in 2017.

We flag this distinction deliberately: this is ownership-transition litigation over a parcel of land, not construction-defect or delivery litigation against whoever is building the tower today. Per our own rule, we will not let a builder's litigation record at other properties color this entry — and equally, we won't let historical land disputes stand in for an actual developer performance record, which simply isn't in the file.

The $565 million construction loan, split between J.P. Morgan as senior lender and Sculptor Real Estate as junior lender, is on record. What isn't on record: total project cost, loan-to-cost ratio, or how much equity the sponsor has behind the debt. A loan of this size for a 195-unit tower is not itself unusual; without the cost basis, there's no way to say whether it looks conservative or aggressive.

HOA dues per square foot are unpublished, so the carrying-cost score (6 of a possible range) was set at the category midpoint by default rather than calculated from an actual number. Buyers should get that figure in writing before assuming anything about monthly cost, and should ask separately about insurance, since that line item is also unscored here due to missing data.

On escrow: Florida law (F.S. 718.202) requires a developer to place only the first 10% of a buyer's deposit into escrow; anything paid beyond that is not statutorily protected unless the developer voluntarily commits to escrow it and that commitment is written into the purchase contract. Our evidence does not state what percentage this project escrows. That is why deposit protection scores 3 out of the available range — the lowest of the categories reviewed here — reflecting an absence of the one disclosure that most directly determines what happens to a buyer's money if the project stalls.

The address is 1428 Brickell Avenue, in the Brickell submarket, where the neighborhood price band in our data runs from $1,500 to $2,600 per square foot. Because this project's own per-square-foot price is not published, there is no way to state from this evidence whether it prices above, within, or below that band.

We do not have transit walk-time data, FEMA flood zone designation, or information on whether the current view is protected by any recorded easement or covenant. We also do not have data on adjacent towers planned or permitted nearby — a material gap in a district where sightlines can change with the next approved permit. The location score of 6 reflects a partial picture built on what little is confirmed (the address itself, in an established high-rise corridor) rather than a verified assessment of durability.

The single largest risk here is not a bad fact — it's an absence of facts. Nineteen of twenty-five tracked data points are unverified or missing: price ceiling, price per square foot, HOA, deposit schedule, escrow percentage, rental policy, sales percentage, developer track record, and neighboring construction activity are all unpublished as of this evidence.

The one place where a specific number exists — the escrow question — is also the one place the score is weakest. Deposit protection sits at 3, driven by the statutory floor of 10% escrow and no confirmation that this project offers more.

The litigation history, while resolved and tied to prior ownership rather than the current build, tells you this parcel had a contentious decade before it became a construction site. That's context, not a red flag on its own — but it underscores how much of what's being sold today rests on a chain of transactions that isn't fully documented in what we were given.

None of this means the project is troubled. It means a buyer signing today is signing ahead of the disclosures that would normally let an analyst tell you whether $4.4 million and up is a fair price for what you get.