It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Across Southern Florida, hundreds of affluent buyers apparently saw something unique in the idea of living in a luxury car-themed condo. But for many of them, things aren’t working out quite as planned in high-rises linked to automotive brands including Porsche, Bentley, Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Mercedes-Benz. Headlight.News has more.
Auto-themed condos are popping up around the world, including the Bugatti Residences in Dubai.
Among the status conscious consumers who’ve made Southern Florida a mecca for luxury car brands like Aston Martin, Lamborghini and Porsche, the next step up the social ladder has become purchasing a condominium linked to those and other high-line auto marques.
The 390 residences in the Mercedes-Benz Places in Miami start at around $1.5 million. To buy into the 70-unit Pagani Residences in Miami’s North Bay Village starts at $3 million. And one unit at Miami’s Aston Martin Residences was priced at $59 million. As expected, such facilities provide plenty of amenities, such as the “Deservator,” built into the Porsche Design Tower in Miami. That’s a fancy name for elevators allowing you to have your luxury vehicle lifted directly into your condo.
At a number of these auto-themed residences, however, buyers have discovered not all is as glamorous, nor as easy, as they expected. Take the Porsche tower. It’s sinking, a new study into the sand along Sunny Isles Beach. Meanwhile, legal issues have cropped up at other such condos, including allegations of fraud, mis-management and “self-dealing” by developers.
Driven to extremes
The Pagani Residences in Miami, a 28-story tower featuring 70 residences off Biscayne Bay.
The concept of branded real-estate projects isn’t new, Business Insider reporting the first of these dates back nearly a century, with an estimated 700 built since then – another 650 now under construction.
Automakers were relatively late to the party, the Porsche project only opening in 2016. The 60-story tower features 132 two-story residences. According to those who follow the branded residence trend, companies like Porsche, Bentley and Aston simply license their names, with no financial skin in the game.
That’s not surprising considering cost of developing a luxury tower in a place like Miami can run to $500 million or more, according to various industry sources. That’s well beyond the resources available to a company like Pagani, for example, even though the 40 cars it produced last year ranged from $2.5 million to $17.5 million for the one-off Zonda HP Barchetta.
Licensing deals can generate millions of dollars in revenue, while also helping enhance a brand’s image – at least until something goes wrong. And with a number of the auto-themed residences in Southern Florida, quite a bit has been going wrong of late.
Sinking sands
The Deservator in the Porsche Design Tower brings your cars right into your condo.
The Porsche tower on Sunny Isles may be facing the most significant challenge of them all, according to a new study by the University of Miami. It’s one of 35 high-rises along the exclusive beach that have begun sinking into the sand by as much as three inches over the last decade.
“Almost all the buildings at the coast itself, they’re subsiding,” Falk Amelung, the study’s senior author, a geophysicist at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science, told the Miami Herald “It’s a lot.”
While the study did not disclose specific structural problems at the Porsche residences, there’s no indication that the subsidence has ended. And that’s enough to concern scientists and building experts who’ve been growing increasingly concerned about Florida’s beachfront housing. Worries have grown since Champlain Tower South in Surfside, Florida collapsed on June 24, 2021, causing the death of 98 people. Meanwhile, experts warn that the entire region could find itself under water in the coming decades as global warming causes sea levels to rise.
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“Self-dealing” alleged at Aston Martin Residences
The Aston Martin Residences Miami.
The problems at Porsche Design Tower have shined a spotlight on the Bentley Residences located about a quarter-mile away on Sunny Isles Beach. That 62-story tower is putting even more weight on the sand and soil underneath, considering it required the largest residential concrete pour in Florida history, a foundation using 20,000 cubic yards of concrete. The 216-unit project has faced a number of construction snags already, and while it was expected to open this year that has been pushed back to late 2027, according to a joint news release from Bentley Motors and Dezer Development.
Trouble, it seems, has plagued the majority, if not all, of the auto-themed Florida residential projects. On January 27, 2026 the condo association at the Aston Martin Residences in Miami filed a lawsuit in Miami-Dade Circuit Court alleging developer German Coto, 10 other companies and seven individuals engaged in “self-dealing” contracts unlawfully using condo association funds.
“I’ve never seen this level of arrogance by a developer, such brazen self-dealing,” David Haber, an attorney representing the condo association, told the Miami Herald, estimating the losses amounted to “millions and millions of dollars.”
Mercedes project facing foreclosure
A rendering of what Mercedes-Benz Places will look like if completed.
From a financial standpoint, the biggest problem has engulfed the Mercedes-Benz Places condo project which has been in the works for more than a decade. A sales center was finally opened last year but it’s unclear how the project now will move forward as the Cottonwood Group this week filed a foreclosure lawsuit against the developer, the JDS Development Group. Cottonwood claims the developer defaulted after failing to pay off its loan by January 2025. JDS allegedly owes nearly $100 million, with interest mounting at a rate of $53,621 a day, according to the Real Deal, a local real estate publication.
Exactly what might happen next is uncertain. As it stands, the 67-story tower is expected to have 791 residences, as well as hotels and offices. Prior to the latest financial setback it was due to open sometime in 2027.
Despite the problems plaguing so many of the auto-themed condo projects, the appeal continues to lure in luxury brand participation. Lamborghini is involved in a 67-story tower in Miami’s Brickell financial district. The exact number of residences has yet to be announced but plans call for Lamborghini Residences to open sometime in 2029.
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