Condos Are for Sale at the Site of Florida’s Surfside Tragedy. Not One Has Sold.

On a rare, undeveloped stretch of white sand along the South Florida coast, a Dubai developer saw promise.

Damac Properties, one of the most prolific developers in the Gulf, hired Zaha Hadid Architects, the renowned London-based design firm, to create “37 mansions in the sky.” The luxury condo tower would feature a suspended glass-bottom rooftop pool, and a 20,000-square-foot meditation garden. Units would start at $15 million.

Martin Langesfeld looked at the same space on the ocean’s edge and saw something entirely different: the site of his sister’s death. She died along with her husband and 96 other people when the Surfside condo tower they were in collapsed five years ago.

“It’s prime real estate but it came at the cost of 98 lives,” Langesfeld said.

The collapse of Champlain Towers South marks its fifth anniversary on Wednesday. It was one of the deadliest structural failures in U.S. history. The 12-story beachfront building fell in a matter of seconds in the middle of the night, a sudden rush of concrete that crushed sleeping families. Many Florida developers viewed rebuilding on the site as too sensitive.

In 2021, a state court ordered the condo association’s receiver to sell the land to help fund a $1 billion settlement for families of the victims. The only firm to bid on the site was Damac, paying $120 million for the roughly 1.8 acres.

A view of the Surfside condo tower site in 2022, a year after the collapse.Tribune News Service via Getty Images

Since then, the developer has struggled to gain traction for the project, the firm’s first in the U.S. A year and a half after Damac launched the sales process, not a single unit has sold.

The Dubai firm has made inquiries about selling the site, according to people familiar with the matter. A Damac spokesman said the property isn’t currently for sale. The firm is now looking to find a partner to handle the day-to-day development going forward, he said.

The site’s tragic history was always going to make rebuilding a challenge, and Damac made missteps when interacting with grieving families, those families and a former city official said. But the Dubai developer had a number of other stumbles, including mistakes in the firm’s marketing and business approach.

A rendering of the proposed condo development project.BINYAN STUDIOS

Damac paused construction activity in February. The company said it hasn’t yet secured the insurance needed to continue construction. That likely reflects in part Damac’s inexperience in South Florida and its lack of a local partner that typically eases the path to securing insurance, insurance brokers said.

Damac’s chairman, Hussain Sajwani, considered the Surfside site a rare opening to break into the U.S.—and at a great price, according to people familiar with the matter.

His proposed $1.6 billion development sits on some of South Florida’s most valuable beachfront real estate, where cranes rise in every direction for dozens of new luxury condo towers.

Damac Properties Chairman Hussain Sajwani with President-elect Donald Trump in January 2025.Scott Olson/Getty Images

Surfside boasts the most elevated condo prices in Miami-Dade, with the top 5% of sales at or above $31 million in the first quarter of 2026. That compares with $3.6 million for Miami-Dade County overall, according to data analyzed by economist Gay Cororaton of the Miami Association of Realtors. Nearby, developer Fort Partners saw so much success with its Four Seasons Surfside project, that it added three other condo buildings.

“We’re one block away and we’re selling at electric prices,” said Fort Partners Chief Executive Nadim Ashi, who said he has sold more than $2 billion in residential units in three months alone.

Families of the deceased in Surfside lobbied Damac to incorporate a memorial on the site, but they were unable to come to an agreement. Instead, relatives secured approvals to build a memorial on a street that abuts the property.

“This is one of the best sites in Miami—past unfortunate situation notwithstanding,” the Damac spokesman said. “We are respectful of the past, but confident about the site.”

Sajwani built his fortune in Dubai selling luxury condos, which fetched as much as $22 million a unit. He launched Damac as Dubai was opening to foreign investors. In 2013, Sajwani landed a licensing deal with the Trump real-estate firm on a Dubai golf club, which anchors the firm’s first large-scale master community development.

Now, he is developing data centers across the Middle East, Europe and the U.S. At a Mar-a-Lago press conference last year, he announced his first U.S. data-center investment alongside President Trump, pledging a $20 billion commitment.

“We’ve been waiting four years to increase our investments in the U.S. to a very large amount of money,” Sajwani said onstage.

At the same time, Damac confronted raw feelings in the neighborhood. Marianne Meischeid, a former commissioner for the town, said the developer’s own actions stiffened resistance.

“They just had this haughty attitude, ‘we’re here, we’re going to get what we want, we’re going to do what we want, and no one’s going to stop us,’” she said.

The Damac spokesman said: “We have worked diligently to be collaborative at every stage of this process. We are operating in accordance with the development agreement, which is the approval of the project by the City of Surfside.”

The site of the collapse in June 2021.Getty Images

Meischeid, the town commissioner at the time, coordinated a meeting between the victims’ families and the developer. She wanted to bring the families together with Jeff Rossely, who has run the development for Damac. 

Rossely told her Damac could donate a bench and a fountain to commemorate the victims that would be part of a nearby memorial, Meischeid said.

But when Rossely met with the families, he never brought up the bench or fountain.

“It was really unfortunate,” Meischeid said. “It just put a deeper divide between the families and the developer.”

The Damac spokesman said the firm was willing to give up 7 feet into the property line for the memorial.

The development’s prices may also have been too high for the neighborhood, some brokers said. Damac is asking $5,000 a square foot with an average price tag of $35 million. The average price a square foot for comparable units in the area is about $4,466.

A representative for Zaha Hadid Architects, which was hired to design the building, said it was “extremely conscious of the tragedy,” adding, “we worked respectfully to create a building that would be worthy of the site.”

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