The Setai Residences: Buying Above a Working Five-Star Hotel

The Setai Residences is a 40-story, 162-residence tower at 101 20th Street in South Beach, completed in 2004 and designed by Jean-Michel Gathy with interiors by Jaya Ibrahim. The residences sit above a working five-star hotel. Our directory's research puts the building near $1,700 per square foot as of August 7, 2026.

Living above a working hotel changes the arithmetic

The single fact that shapes everything else at The Setai is that the residential tower shares a property with an operating luxury hotel. Our building record describes residents drawing on the hotel's three temperature-controlled pools, its spa and its service — which is the appeal, and also the complication.

Hotel-integrated ownership is a genuinely different product from a standalone condominium, and it is worth naming the differences before the amenity list seduces you. Service levels are set by a hotel operator with its own standards and its own economics, not solely by a residential board answering to owners. Shared facilities carry shared cost structures, and the allocation of those costs between the hotel and the residential association is a negotiated document rather than a natural fact. And the property runs at hotel intensity year-round, with arrivals, events and turnover that a purely residential building never sees.

None of that is a defect. It is simply the trade: you buy a level of service and a beachfront position that a 162-unit building could not sustain alone, and in exchange you accept an operating partner. The full profile we maintain is at /buildings/the-setai-residences.

What our directory actually records

The verifiable outline is short. The building was completed in 2004 and rises 40 stories with 162 residences. Jean-Michel Gathy is credited as architect and Jaya Ibrahim as interior designer, and our record describes the design as pairing the district's Art Deco heritage with an Asian-inspired residential language. Layouts run from one to four bedrooms.

Two of those numbers deserve emphasis. First, 162 residences across 40 floors is roughly four homes per floor — moderate density for an oceanfront Miami Beach tower, well above the full-floor rarity of a building like /buildings/apogee-south-beach and well below the several-hundred-unit resort format. Second, 2004 means the building is now past two decades of Atlantic exposure, which puts it squarely inside the diligence regime that Florida imposed after Surfside. The framework is explained at /blog/miami-condo-milestone-inspection-sirs.

The widest price band in our South Beach set

Our research records a range from roughly $1.5 million to $28 million, with an average near $1,700 per square foot. Those are our directory's periodic estimates, not live comparable sales, and they should be read as a description of the building's shape rather than as pricing for any residence in it.

The shape is the point. A range spanning nearly nineteen times from bottom to top inside 162 doors tells you the building stacks small one-bedroom pieds-à-terre and large upper-floor residences in the same elevator bank. Practically, that means the phrase "what does a unit at The Setai cost" has no useful answer — the line, the floor and the exposure decide almost everything, and a citywide or even building-wide average will mislead you in both directions.

We do not operate an MLS feed in the Miami market, so any listing figures on our Miami pages are clearly labeled samples rather than live inventory. Our compiled Miami research figures are summarized at /market-stats. For a real current price on a specific residence, that number has to come from a licensed agent pulling live data.

Dues at $1.80 a foot, and the question behind them

Our directory records HOA dues at approximately $1.80 per square foot per month as a research figure. That is at the upper end of what we record across our Miami set, and in a hotel-integrated building it is the number that most rewards scrutiny.

Ask not what the dues are but what they are buying and from whom. In a shared-property structure, some of what a resident consumes is delivered by the hotel operator under a services or cost-sharing agreement, and the terms of that agreement — how costs are allocated, how they escalate, who can change them, and what happens if the hotel changes hands or flag — sit outside the association's budget while driving a real part of it. A budget line labeled "shared facilities" is a contract you have not read yet.

Layer the Florida-specific costs on top: the master policy and what an owner must carry separately, covered at /blog/miami-condo-insurance-master-policy-vs-ho6, and the reserve funding that state law now requires associations to hold rather than waive.

Where it sits among South Beach's oceanfront towers

Our neighborhood research puts South Beach's median condo price near $825,000 and roughly $980 per square foot, across an estimated 52 buildings — labeled estimates from our own research, and the area guide is at /neighborhoods/south-beach. Against that backdrop The Setai's research average of about $1,700 per foot is firmly in the branded, service-heavy tier rather than the neighborhood midpoint.

Its natural comparisons are the other hotel-and-brand properties on the sand, not the deco walk-ups. /buildings/ritz-carlton-residences-south-beach and /buildings/delano-residences-miami-beach are the closest structural analogues in our South Beach set, and /buildings/faena-house one neighborhood north in Mid-Beach is the low-density, purely residential counterargument. The fuller area context is at /blog/south-beach-condo-guide.

The hotel-condo questions we would ask first

Five, in order, and all of them before an offer rather than after.

Get the shared-facilities or cost-sharing agreement between the residential association and the hotel, and read how costs escalate and who may amend them. Ask what happens to that agreement if the hotel is sold or rebranded. Pull the association's current adopted budget and reserve study, and compare the reserve position against a 2004 oceanfront building's realistic envelope and facade obligations. Confirm the milestone inspection and structural integrity reserve study status. And ask the manager directly what the building's rules are on short-term occupancy and on residents' access to hotel services, since both are commonly misdescribed in listing remarks.

We are a research directory, not a brokerage. We do not list on the MLS, negotiate offers or close transactions; when you are ready to act on a specific residence, we introduce you to a licensed partner agent who can pull live data and order the documents above.

Questions buyers ask about The Setai Residences