Tenants' impact at the Plaza Brickell
I manage several rental units at the Plaza Brickell, and I spoke with many tenants, especially in the elevators, where we are now spending quite some time.
It is an unanimous opinion: they have all seen that the Plaza Brickell went through a concerning degradation of services and maintenance during this year 2025.
This is unanimous, even for tenants who don’t really know what is happening or were not informed of the changes of Management and Board, they all saw the difference, and not in a positive way.
They saw a less professional frontdesk, the building not being cleaned properly, packages lost, and of course the persisting issues with the elevators. Tenants have to go to work, or bring their children to school, and using the elevators should not be the punishment that it is right now.
As a Tenant, how can you help?
You cannot vote as a tenant, but you can contact your Landlord, or your Property Manager, and let them know that due to the 2025 Board the building is currently degrading and it negatively affect your quality of life. You are a tenant, but you still need to be on time at work, or at your appointments, or when you bring your children to school.
We had a few weeks ago a major outage where all the elevators were down from 3am to 5:30am. Luckily the majority of residents were asleep. But we could have had a pregnant woman with a medical emergency, or a pilot that has to go to work early, etc.
So you can help by contacting your Landlord, letting them know that we cannot let the building degrades like that, and asking them to vote in the Board Election for Franck Dossa.
If you don’t normally communicate with your Landlord, then send this to your Property Manager.
You can take a photo of this and send it directly, or download it.
Tenants are important in a condominium
There is a common misconception that only owners should be considered in a condominium. I have always disagreed with that. I think that it is very important that Tenants are treated correctly, as many will become future owners in the building.
As a matter of facts, the majority of buyers at the Plaza Brickell these past 5-7 years are Tenants, who were living in the building for a few years, and liked it and decided to purchase a condominium.
So it is important to treat them equally.
There is also the fact that the Tenants pay a rent to the Landlord, and then the Landlord pays the Monthly Maintenance Fees. Those maintenance fees will pay for the management salaries, for the upkeep of the building, for the reserves, for the capital improvement projects, etc. So they are actually contributing directly to the building.
I have seen also that Tenants are important for the real estate value of a building. When Tenants are happy, they stay in the building for many years, and that was the case at the Plaza Brickell. We have many tenants who are living at the Plaza Brickell for 10 years, and even since 2008 when the building opened.
When Tenants stay and live a long time in the same building the rent goes up. So the rentability for the investors goes up as well, and it attracts more investors. Attracting more investors increase the value of all units, and the other owners property benefit from that as well. So it is good policy for everyone to treat the Tenants properly in a building.
I do manage rental units at the Plaza Brickell and in several other buildings, in Brickell, in Edgewater, Miami Beach, etc. It was always way quicker to rent a unit at the Plaza Brickell (2 to 3 weeks), vs other buildings in Brickell where it could take me 2 to 3 months. For an investor that is a significant difference.
A few years ago one of my client wanted to purchase a second rental unit, and wanted to diversify his investments. He had already one unit at the Plaza Brickell. We selected a nice unit in Coconut Grove, in an older building, with a very nice view on a canal. Then I did a rentability study, and extracted from the MLS the average days to rent a unit in this community. It was actually 3.5 months. That meant for my client 3.5 months where he will be paying his mortgage, maintenance fees and property taxes, with no rental income. The same calculations for the Plaza Brickell were 2 weeks at the time, so needless to say that he bought a second rental condominium at the Plaza Brickell.