Foundation crews are officially chewing up dirt on 71st Street, as Palma Miami Beach starts to rise into what is set to be a 14-story condo tower in the heart of North Beach’s Town Center corridor. Heavy machinery and pile rigs are now working the site, installing production piles and setting up the substructure for a project that will bring new condominiums, structured parking and ground-floor retail to one of Miami Beach’s most closely watched stretches.
The construction team has moved into augercast pile installation, marking the true start of foundation work, according to a recent update from KAST Construction. That same contractor update notes the project is targeting LEED Gold certification, which would put Palma in the higher tier of energy-efficient residential buildings once completed.
What They Are Building
Developer and contractor materials describe Palma as a 14-story tower with a bit of wiggle in the exact unit count. Marketing materials promote about 126 residences, while the contractor’s recent update cites 121 units. Either way, it is a roughly hundred-plus-condo building with private balconies throughout.
Lefferts and the official project site list residences ranging from roughly 405 to 1,342 square feet. Units are marketed with high-end finishes that include Bosch appliances, stone countertops and floor-to-ceiling impact-resistant glass.
The building program also calls for about 8,500 square feet of ground-floor retail that will plug directly into the Town Center streetscape. Plans outline more than 10,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor amenities, including a resort-style pool deck, wellness hot tub and cold plunge, a fitness center equipped with Technogym gear, a media and game lounge, an outdoor summer kitchen and a double-height attended lobby, according to project materials on Palma Miami Beach.
Where It Fits In North Beach
Palma is one of several new projects riding the development wave that followed a 2017 voter-approved update to Town Center zoning. Those changes increased allowable floor-area ratios and opened 71st Street to taller, denser mixed-use construction, according to planning records in the City of Miami Beach.
Master-planning and the new rules have helped set the stage for more vertical development and added retail uses along the corridor. Business reporting has also highlighted Palma’s early traction with buyers, with roughly half of its condos reported as presold at the time of the groundbreaking, per coverage in the South Florida Business Journal. For North Beach, that level of advance sales is one more signal that investors and future residents are betting on the area’s next chapter.
Sales, Timeline And Local Impact
Sales materials and earlier reporting peg starting prices in the mid $600,000s, with a notable share of buyers coming from overseas. The Real Deal has detailed early pricing and sales trends for the project.
Previous coverage of Palma’s ceremonial start and construction milestones traces how the project moved from a high-profile groundbreaking into the current foundation phase. Earlier reporting notes a tentative delivery window in the later part of 2027, according to Florida YIMBY.
In the near term, neighbors can expect the usual byproducts of a big foundation push: more truck traffic on 71st Street, extended hours of site activity and plenty of construction noise as augercast piles and pile caps are finished. Once the heavy underground work wraps and crews pivot to the podium and tower, Palma will become a very visible marker of how quickly North Beach’s Town Center experiment is turning into concrete reality.
