Miami Apartment Buildings is the second directory we have built. The first, Chicago Apartment Buildings, now indexes 290 rental buildings across twelve neighborhoods. It exists because searching for an apartment in a large city has an odd gap in it: there are thousands of pages about individual units that were available last Tuesday, and almost nothing about the buildings themselves, which are still there and still the thing you actually live in.
The response to the Chicago directory is what convinced us to build a second one. Miami is that second one.
It is also being built with a specific reader in mind, and that reader is not always a person.
“I’m building this for the machines as much as for the people,” says founder Joe Bjorklund. “When somebody asks an AI assistant which buildings in Brickell have more than 300 apartments and allow dogs, that answer has to come from somewhere. I want it to come from here — one page per building, structured, sourced, and correct.”
That goal shapes almost every decision below.
What this directory is
Miami Apartment Buildings indexes professionally managed apartment buildings of 50 units or more in the City of Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables and North Bay Village. Every building gets one page: the address, the number of apartments, the year it was built, the floor count, the amenities, the pet policy, the parking, and the nearest rail station. Buildings are grouped into fifteen neighborhoods, from Brickell and Downtown to Allapattah, Overtown, Flagami and Little Haiti.
What it is not is a listings site. We do not publish rents, we do not track availability, and we do not rank buildings against each other. Those things change weekly and are covered well elsewhere. A building’s height, age, unit count and amenity set change almost never, and that is the part nobody has organized.
How the list was built
The obvious way to assemble a directory like this is to scrape the rental aggregators and take whatever they list. We did not do that, for a simple reason: aggregator coverage reflects who is currently advertising, not what exists. Buildings that are fully leased vanish. Buildings that market through their own site never appear.
Instead the list started from the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser’s parcel records — every parcel in the four municipalities coded as multifamily with 50 or more units. That is an exhaustive starting point rather than a promotional one. It produced 385 candidate properties.
Then we took things out.
Government-owned parcels, public-housing leaseholds and charitable-use properties came out first, identified by ownership and state use code rather than by guesswork. That removed 60 properties. What remained went through the test that defines this directory:
A building belongs here if it has its own leasing website, or if a management company publishes a dedicated page for it. If the only thing findable is an aggregator listing, a government register, or nothing at all, it does not belong here.
That rule is doing real work. It is the difference between a directory of buildings you can actually contact and a register of every structure with apartments in it. Eighteen borderline properties were researched one at a time rather than filtered by pattern, and the result was instructive: ten passed and eight failed, which means any rule based on how the owner’s name sounded would have been wrong more than half the time.
The clearest example: a 2025 building called Joule House, 308 units, managed by Bozzuto, sits behind an owner entity named “FBWS Development Senior LLC.” Affordable and senior housing is frequently professionally managed and belongs in a directory of managed buildings. You have to test the building, not the owner.
Why we do not simply publish the county’s numbers
The parcel record is an excellent way to find buildings and an unreliable way to describe them. Every listing gets checked against the building’s own leasing site before it is published, and the county figure loses that argument regularly, in four distinct ways.
It lags. Newly finished towers carry stale counts. Flow Brickell is recorded at 620 apartments and 55 floors; the operator, the trade press and four listing services all say 632 and 54.
It counts hotel rooms as apartments. Panorama Tower on Brickell Bay Drive is recorded as 1,029 units. The building has 821 apartments above a pedestal containing a 208-room hotel. 821 plus 208 is exactly 1,029. Publishing the county number would have overstated the building by a quarter.
It is sometimes simply wrong. Miami World Tower, at 710 NE 1st Avenue, is recorded as 34 floors. It is a 579-foot building of 53 storeys.
It uses different definitions. “Year built” in the parcel record may be a permit date or a structural-completion date. Panorama Tower is recorded as 2016 and opened in July 2018.
And the owner name is close to useless as a clue to what a building is called. The entity that owns Atlantic Square in Overtown is called Block 45 LLC. Square Station is owned by 14 Plaza Corp. Downtown 5th is owned by 5 Plaza LLC. Nobody looking for an apartment has ever searched for any of those.
Built to be quoted
Most building descriptions on the web are paragraphs. A paragraph is fine for a person skimming and close to useless for anything trying to extract a specific fact from it.
So on this site the facts do not live in the prose. A building’s floor count, year built, unit count, five key amenities and nearest rail station are each a separate structured field in the database, not a sentence and not a row typed into a table. They can be filtered, compared and read directly. The prose exists alongside them for the human reader, not as the place the data is kept.
This is a deliberate break from how we built Chicago, where those three numbers were typed into a Fast Facts table on each page. Miami keeps one source of truth for each fact, and makes it the machine-readable one.
Every section of every building page also carries a stable anchor — amenities, unit features, pet policy, parking, location — so a single fact can be linked to directly rather than by pointing at the page and hoping. If something wants to cite this directory’s answer about one building’s pet policy, it can cite that answer specifically.
The rule that outranks the others
Never publish a fact we cannot confirm from a real source.
That sounds like a platitude until you watch what it costs. It means a building’s floor count is left blank when the operator says 56, the county says 58 and the groundbreaking press said 57, because there is no way to know which is right. It means Flow Brickell has no phone number on its page: the operator publishes only a text line, and the four different numbers on the aggregator sites are call-tracking lines rather than the leasing office. It means a pet policy section disappears entirely when one listing service says cats but not dogs and another says dogs but not cats.
An empty field on these pages is a decision, not an oversight. We would rather tell you nothing about a building’s floor count than tell you something that turns out to be wrong, because a directory is only worth using if the things it does say can be relied on. That applies double to a source built to be quoted: a confident wrong answer travels further than a careful one.
Where it stands
Two hundred and ninety-three buildings are queued for Miami, roughly 57,000 apartments. Pages are being researched and published in small daily batches rather than imported in bulk, because each one requires someone to actually read the building’s own site and confirm what is there.
The queue is ordered largest first, so the biggest towers arrive earliest. Smaller and older buildings, and a handful of properties whose status could not be confirmed, are held back for a later pass. If a building you are looking for is not here yet, it is very likely coming.
Dallas and Austin are next.