Sunbeam Properties, led by the billionaire Ansin family that owns WSVN Channel 7, bought out an older condo in North Bay Village to demolish the building.

The individual owners of the 24-unit Treasure Island Cove Condominium at 1639 N. Treasure Drive sold to Sunbeam Properties for a combined $8 million, CEO Andy Ansin said. Their approval to sell was unanimous, he added.

“My policy is I’m not buying this condo unless 100% of the owners agree to sell,” Ansin said. “I didn’t want to get into a situation where we had to evict someone.” He worked with Beachfront Realty brokers Sam Heskiel and Marilina Apfelbaum, along with attorney Howard Friedberg of Katz Barron, to complete the deal. The Treasure Island Cove Condominium is situated on a landlocked site of about three quarters of an acre. The condo was built in 1952 and many of the units were assessed by the Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser in the mid $100,000s. Sunbeam bought them for $333,333 each. Ansin said the building had a 40-year recertification exam coming up and it was behind on repairs. Unit owners were facing a significant assessment to pay for those repairs and they likely would have had to temporarily leave the building during some of the work, he added. That’s why the owners agreed to sell, but it was still a difficult negotiation that the brokers handled excellently, he added.

The building had a 40-year recertification exam coming up and it was behind on repairs, the buyer said.

 

Many condos in South Florida are facing difficult choices between funding costly repairs or selling out to developers in the wake of new state laws that required condo associations to fully fund future repairs.

Sunbeam plans to tear down the condo and add this to its major development site in North Bay Village, which now totals 14 acres. It already owned the shopping center across Pirate Ally to the north of the condo.

North Bay Village approved Sunbeam for about 7.1 million square feet of development in 2022, including over 1,900 residential units, office, retail and a hotel. Ansin said the site of the Treasure Island Cove Condo would likely contain elements of that project that don’t need to be along the bay, such as the parking. Plus, this will help Sunbeam carry out the city’s village for improving Pirates Ally.

The first phase of its North Bay Village project will be a 250-unit condo tower on the site of what’s currently an office building, Ansin said. He hopes to release drawings of that project in the next nine months.

That redevelopment will eventually include the headquarters site of WSVN. The TV station will move ahead with plans to relocate its headquarters to a new studio in Miramar to free up that land for development.