Miami-Dade Retail: the county median hides everything

Key Biscayne retail has a median of $1,220 per square foot. Homestead retail has a median of $278. Both are Miami-Dade. Both come out of the same set of recorded, arm's-length deed transfers I keep, covering 721 retail sales since 2021. If those two numbers can live inside one county figure, you already know what I think of the county figure.

The ladder, top to bottom

Median price per square foot by municipality, every city with at least a dozen recorded sales:

• Key Biscayne: $1,220 across 16 sales
• Miami Beach: $712 across 76 sales
• South Miami: $653 across 14 sales
• Coral Gables: $618 across 33 sales
• Sweetwater: $521 across 21 sales
• Doral: $473 across 43 sales
• Miami: $458 across 225 sales
• Miami Springs: $414 across 13 sales
• North Miami Beach: $392 across 26 sales
• Miami Gardens: $365 across 23 sales
• Palmetto Bay: $362 across 15 sales
• Hialeah: $333 across 63 sales
• North Miami: $328 across 40 sales
• Homestead: $278 across 34 sales

The county median for retail is $454. Notice how few cities actually sit near it. The City of Miami at $458 and Doral at $473 are the only two in shouting distance, and Miami carries 225 of the 721 sales, so the county number is close to a City of Miami number that everyone else borrows.

Miami Beach at $712 on 76 sales is the second-deepest submarket in the county and it prices at more than twice Hialeah's $333 on 63 sales. Those are both real, well-populated reads. Neither is an outlier. They are simply different markets that happen to share a property appraiser.

Then size cuts across the map

Geography is the first sort. The second one is building size, and it moves prices almost as far. Miami-Dade retail by size band:

• Under 2,500 SF: 247 sales, median $522/SF
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: 308 sales, median $462/SF
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: 115 sales, median $362/SF
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: 22 sales, median $512/SF
• 50,000 SF and above: 29 sales, median $232/SF

A small storefront clears $522 a foot. Anything above 50,000 square feet clears $232. That is a $290 gap driven by nothing except how many square feet came attached to the deed.

The county quartiles say the same thing from another angle. A quarter of Miami-Dade retail sales cleared below $303 a foot and a quarter cleared above $754. That is the ordinary middle of the market, before you go anywhere near Key Biscayne, and it already spans roughly two and a half times from one edge to the other. A median parked in the center of that range is not a benchmark. It is a coin flip with a decimal point on it.

The band I do not trust, and why I am showing it anyway

The 25,000 to 50,000 SF band reads $512, above the band below it and more than double the band above it. That is not a market signal. It is 22 sales. Twenty-two transactions across five years in a county this size means one anchored strip center with good frontage can move the median by a hundred dollars a foot.

I could have hidden that row and the page would look tidier. Every subscription data product I have ever paid for would have hidden it. But an owner of a 30,000 SF center who prices off $512 because a chart told him to is going to sit on the market for a year, and the honest read is that the band is too thin to price from. Use the neighbors: $362 below it, $232 above it, and your own rent roll in between.

What retail has actually done since 2021

My recorded sales put Miami-Dade retail at $358 per square foot in 2021, $451 in 2022, $492 in 2024 and $511 in 2025. The 2026 partial year prints $624, but on 38 sales, and I would not carry that number into a pricing conversation. Five months of thin data is a sample, not a trend.

The typical retail asset in this dataset was built in 1969, measures 4,160 square feet, and traded for $1,900,000. That is the median. Most of what changes hands in Miami-Dade retail is old, small, and infill, which is worth remembering the next time somebody shows you a chart built on new construction.

Does the demand data support any of this?

Partly, and I would rather say so than sell you a story.

Retail trade employment in the Miami metro division was down 0.1 percent year over year in the BLS metro employment data for July 2026, preliminary and not seasonally adjusted. Flat, essentially. Meanwhile the Census Bureau's county estimates covering 1 July 2024 to 1 July 2025 have Miami-Dade losing 10,115 residents to finish at 2,802,029, with net domestic out-migration of 72,254 over July 2024 through June 2025 and 54,204 international arrivals moving the other way. Retail is a rooftops business. The rooftops did not grow.

What did grow is spending power per household. Average weekly wages in Miami-Dade reached $1,797 in the first quarter of 2026 per the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, up 4.6 percent, running ahead of the national $1,654 and its 3.9 percent gain. Total payrolls added 10,800 jobs to 1,343,400, and the metro division's unemployment rate of 2.5 percent is the lowest of any metropolitan division in the country, down from 2.9 percent.

Fewer people, better paid, fully employed. That is a defensible case for infill retail holding value and a poor case for anything that needs population growth to underwrite it. Note also that QCEW covered employment, the administrative count the payroll survey gets benchmarked to, was down 7,449 in Miami-Dade for March 2026 against March 2025. The job gains may get revised down.

How I use this on either side of a deal

Age is the variable owners skip most often, and this dataset makes the case for paying attention to it. Half the retail that changed hands in Miami-Dade was built in 1969 or earlier. If the comp somebody handed you was renovated in the last five years and your building was not, the per-foot figure connecting the two is carrying an adjustment that nobody bothered to write down.

For a seller, the sequence is city, then size band, then age and frontage. A 2,000 SF storefront in Coral Gables and a 2,000 SF storefront in Homestead are not adjacent comps, and neither is the same building at 20,000 SF. If you want that worked out on a specific asset before you go to market, that is the point of a disposition assignment rather than a listing agreement signed off a headline.

For a tenant, the gradient tells you where your leverage is. Landlords of large-format space are sitting on product that trades at $232 a foot while small-shop owners are marking to $522, and their rent expectations do not always reflect that difference. I represent tenants, so I watch that gap closely. It is the whole argument in a retail tenant representation negotiation.

The rest of the county, across office and industrial as well, sits in the Miami-Dade market report.