F1 driver just bought a Brickell condo. Check the top luxury sales, contracts

Real Estate News admin August 25, 2026 0 Comments

F1 driver just bought a Brickell condo. Check the top luxury sales, contracts

A Brazilian race car driver’s $8 million South Brickell townhome purchase was one of the top transactions in Miami-Dade last week.

Rubens Barrichello bought a unit at Colette Residences, a luxury condo building that has yet to break ground.

Other top sales and contracts in Miami-Dade last week included a home in Golden Beach that went under contract for $79.5 million. A Hibiscus Island property with ties to an alleged fraud and money laundering scheme went under contract for $24 million.

A weekly report of single-family home and condo contracts over $4 million in Miami-Dade from Douglas Elliman’s Eklund Gomes Team showed 22 contracts signed between Aug. 17 and Aug. 23 worth a total of nearly $250 million. During the same week last year, nine contracts worth a total of $92.3 million were signed.

The Eklund Gomes report doesn’t typically include pre-construction sales, like Barrichello’s unit at Colette, a boutique luxury building that will go up at 1880 Brickell Ave. Barrichello competed as an F1 driver for 19 seasons and has also raced as an IndyCar and stock car driver. Last year, he won the NASCAR Brasil Series.

The developer of Colette Residences, Miami-based META Development, began demolishing the existing multifamily building on the site in July and plans to break ground on the condo project this fall.

Last week’s most expensive transaction was a newly built waterfront mansion in Golden Beach that went under contract for nearly $80 million. If the sale of the 12-bedroom 17,500-square-foot spec home closes, it would be the most expensive home ever sold in the coastal North Miami-Dade municipality.

A 1956 home at 205 N. Hibiscus Dr. went under contract last week after being forfeited by its previous owner in a plea deal. Daniel Liburdi, who was federally indicted in a $128 million scheme earlier this year, had to give up the waterfront home, along with another property on Hibiscus Island, a condo in the Virgin Islands and multiple Ferraris, the Miami New Times reported.

In Key Biscayne, a home owned by a company tied to investor John Devaney went under contract for $19.5 million. Devaney, the founder and CEO of the distressed debt investment firm United Capital Markets, also owns a nearby home where parts of the movie “Scarface” were filmed.

The home at 485 W. Matheson Dr. was listed earlier this year for $237 million, making it one of the most expensive homes on the market in Miami-Dade. The waterfront mansion, which was drug lord Frank Lopez’s home in the 1983 movie, was built in 1981 on land that was once part of President Richard Nixon’s “winter White House,” an assemblage of properties on Key Biscayne that Nixon visited more than 50 times throughout his presidency.

Several of this week’s top single-family contracts were for homes that will likely be torn down and redeveloped. It’s become increasingly common for the value of the land a home is sitting on to outpace the value of the home itself. This often happens in desirable neighborhoods where land is scarce.

The listing for the Hibiscus Island home off the MacArthur Causeway forfeited by Liburdi calls the property a “development opportunity.” The listing for a 1953 home in the Venetian Islands that went under contract last week for $9.4 million says the best use of the site would be “demolition for new build.” The listing for a 1935 Coconut Grove home that went under contract for $5.9 million calls the property an “opportunity to create a new estate.”