The Friends and Family window, explained

When a luxury Miami tower opens for sale, it does not open to the public on day one. It opens first to a closed list. Developers call it the Friends and Family window. The name is older than it sounds. In the 1990s, when New York condo developers borrowed the term from the restaurant industry, it described an actual private list: friends, family, and select brokers who could buy a unit before the public sales gallery opened. The list was perhaps a hundred names.

Today the term has expanded. A Miami pre-construction Friends and Family window is a structured ninety to one hundred and twenty day commercial period during which a few dozen brokerage firms receive the developer's release sheet, place clients into unit-lines, and write contracts at a pricing structure that the public never sees. By the time the public gallery opens, between sixty and eighty percent of the building is typically sold.

This essay is about how that window works, what the pricing differential actually is, why it matters more than people new to pre-construction realize, and how the window is most commonly lost.

What the developer is doing during the window

A pre-construction tower is a financing instrument before it is a building. The developer needs to hit a contract threshold, usually sixty or seventy percent of the units sold, to release the construction loan. The loan covenants are written against that threshold. Until it is hit, the construction does not start.

The Friends and Family window exists to hit that threshold quickly, with as little marketing spend and as little price discovery as possible. A few dozen brokerages, each with a stable of high-net-worth clients who buy without a financing contingency, will absorb the first wave of the building. The developer pays a higher commission to those brokerages, typically six percent versus the four percent that the public sales gallery pays later. The buyer never sees that commission spread. It is funded inside the unit price.

The pricing during the window is set against the developer's underwriting, not against market comparables. The window is the only commercial period of a Miami pre-construction project in which the buyer is negotiating against the developer's cost basis rather than against the public market for the building. By the time the public list publishes, the market for the building exists, and the price floor adjusts upward.

The release sheet

The release sheet is the document the developer sends to participating brokerages on the first day of the window. It is, in physical form, a spreadsheet. Rows are unit lines, lettered A through whatever the building has. Columns are floors, numbered from the lowest residential floor to the top. Cells are prices, listed at three or four decimal points of dollar per square foot.

A buyer who has never seen one assumes the prices are continuous up the column. They are not. A release sheet is structured in waves. The developer releases a band of floors, usually five to eight, at a base floor price, then re-releases the next band at a higher base after the first band closes a certain percentage of units. A typical small tower has four or five waves across the window. A large tower has eight or ten.

The wave structure is the developer's way of recovering price as the building absorbs. Wave one is sold against the underwriting price. Wave two is set five percent above wave one. Wave three is set seven to ten percent above wave two. By the time the public gallery opens on day one hundred and twenty, the remaining inventory has typically gone through three or four upward price adjustments.

This is the part that does not exist on the public list. The public list shows a single price column, presented as the asking. Inside the window, the same unit-line had two or three different prices over the preceding ninety days, depending on which wave a particular buyer's broker had access to.

Floor premium and unit-line preference

The structure inside the release sheet is more granular than the public list will ever be. Two specific dimensions matter.

The floor premium is the per-floor escalation, typically one to two percent. The premium funds the view that opens as the unit rises above adjacent buildings. It is not constant. There is a view threshold floor in every tower, the floor at which the building clears its neighbors and the view becomes the marketing view. The premium between the floor below and the floor above that threshold is typically four to six percent, not one to two. Inside the release sheet, the threshold is explicit. On the public list, it is hidden inside the floor-by-floor asking and the buyer never sees the discontinuity.

The unit-line preference is the lateral pricing across letters. Two units on the same floor, of the same square footage, can price five to fifteen percent apart depending on which side of the building they face. North-facing units in a Brickell tower with skyline exposure price higher than south-facing units with parking-deck exposure. A unit on the western edge of an Aventura building, looking at the intracoastal, prices higher than a unit on the eastern edge facing the ocean simply because the western units sell out first in the buyer pool the developer is targeting. The release sheet reflects this. The public list flattens it.

Inside the window, a buyer can request a specific unit-line. Outside the window, the buyer takes what is available.

Three ways buyers lose the window

The window is lost in three predictable ways.

First, by waiting for the public list. A buyer who reads about a project in the trade press, then asks a brokerage for information, is already in the public-gallery flow. The window has closed for that brokerage, or the brokerage was never on the developer's release list to begin with. By the time the marketing campaign reaches the buyer, the window is gone. This is the most common pattern.

Second, by working through a brokerage that is not on the developer's release list. There are perhaps thirty to forty firms in South Florida that participate in the major launches. The list is not public, but it is consistent. A brokerage that closed twenty pre-construction units in the previous twelve months gets the release sheet. A brokerage that closed two does not. A buyer represented by the second firm sits in the public-gallery pool, against the same units, at higher prices.

Third, by underwriting too slowly. The release sheet circulates with seventy-two-hour or one-hundred-and-twenty-hour windows on specific unit-lines. A buyer who needs three weeks to decide loses the unit to the next buyer in line. Pre-construction inside the window is not a patient process. The deposit is wired against a contract that was signed within five days of the unit-line being released.

The deposit schedule and the assignment question

Inside the window, the deposit schedule is also more favorable than the public schedule. The standard Florida pre-construction deposit is twenty percent at contract, with additional installments released at construction milestones. Inside the window, large developers occasionally accept a ten-percent initial deposit with the remaining ten percent at groundbreaking. Outside the window, the schedule defaults to the standard.

The same is true for assignment policy. A buyer who acquires a unit inside the window often retains the right to assign the contract to a third party before delivery, with the developer's consent. A buyer outside the window typically does not. The assignment clause matters to investors with a three-to-five-year horizon; it is worth more than most buyers realize at the contract stage. We have seen unit-lines trade hands twice before the keys deliver, with each assignment realizing a meaningful premium.

What the window looks like from inside Z Group

We watch the release sheets land. Most of the major Miami pre-construction launches between 2025 and 2028 have already published their first release wave. Some are in wave two. A few are in wave four. The information matters less than the position. Z Group sits on the release list of every major South Florida launch we have agreed to represent. That position is the deliverable.

When a buyer asks us why the access matters, the answer is in the release sheet. The wave-one price for a specific unit-line versus the wave-four price. The difference is not theoretical. It is the dollar figure between two cells in a spreadsheet, written ninety days apart.

When a buyer asks us when to engage, the answer is, before the marketing campaign begins. Once the marketing campaign is visible, the window is closing. There is still pricing to be done in the second half of the window, but it is upward pricing. The first half of the window is the only period in which the buyer is below the developer's public floor.

The window is the structural advantage in Miami pre-construction. It is also the part of the market that the public press writes about least. The buyer who understands it operates inside a different commercial reality than the buyer who does not. Welcome home.