Walk the half mile of Collins Avenue between 167th Street and 184th right now and you will pass two versions of the same neighborhood. One version just finished. The other is still being built, one floor at a time, in full view of anyone standing on the beach.
That is not a metaphor about change in general. It is a literal description of what is happening on this block in the last quarter of 2026. The Sunny, the reimagined resort next to the historic Newport Fishing Pier, completed a $62 million transformation and reopened its doors on November 1, 2025. A few minutes north, at 18401 Collins Avenue, Bentley Residences is climbing toward 62 stories, and as of early August it had reached roughly level 13. One project is done. The other is not remotely close, and the way it is not close tells you more about living here than either fact does on its own.
The Renovation That Finished Overnight
For years, the building at 16701 Collins Avenue was the Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, a property that traced back to 1967 and had been family owned since 1984. Renovations like this one tend to happen in the background for residents, visible mostly as scaffolding and closed sections of beach. Then, on a single date, the work stops being background and becomes a place you can actually walk into.
The Sunny opened as that place on November 1, 2025. It kept the bones of the old Newport but rebuilt the experience around them: Lovebirds Coffee Bar for a morning stop that did not exist on this stretch before, Citrus Shack on the pool deck, and Sandbar, a toes-in-the-sand beach bar sitting a short walk from the water. The property still sits beside the Newport Fishing Pier, the same pier that has anchored this part of the beach through every version of the buildings around it.
That pier matters more than it might seem. It is the one fixed point on this stretch that has not changed ownership, brand, or purpose while everything around it has turned over. Locals who fish there on a Tuesday morning are doing something that would have been familiar to someone doing the same thing a decade ago, even though the hotel behind them has been rebuilt twice in that span.
The Tower That Is Rising by the Floor
North of The Sunny, between Turnberry Ocean Club Residences and Sahara Beach Club Condo, Bentley Residences is having the opposite experience. There is no reopening date to circle on a calendar. There is only a pace: roughly one floor every five to six working days, according to Dezer Development's own construction updates this year.
That pace is not abstract if you live nearby. In late May, the tower had reached level 7. By early August, tracking from Florida YIMBY put it at approximately 13 stories, a gain of six floors in about ten weeks. That works out slower than the announced five-to-six-day pace would predict, which tracks with how concrete towers typically move through their lower, denser floors before picking up speed higher up. The building is a 62-story, 716-foot tower designed by Sieger Suarez Architects, and it will eventually hold 216 residences, each with a private sky garage reached by an in-unit car elevator. None of that changes what it looks like from a beach chair right now: a crane, a rising concrete core, and a pace you can track week to week if you are paying attention.
Two Clocks, One Half Mile
Here is the part that is easy to miss if you only register these as two separate updates instead of one story. The Sunny's clock ran for years and then stopped all at once, on a specific date, with a ribbon and a set of new doors. Bentley Residences is running the opposite clock. It has no single day when it becomes real. It becomes real six inches at a time.
Do the arithmetic on the tower's own numbers and something useful falls out. From level 13, there are 49 more floors to go. At five to six days each, that is roughly eight to ten months of pure vertical climb from today, assuming the announced pace holds, which puts a plausible topping-out somewhere in the first half of 2027. But Dezer Development has said completion is not anticipated until 2028. That gap, the space between the crane reaching its final height and the doors actually opening, could stretch a year or more of work that will not be visible from the beach. Curtain wall, interiors, mechanical systems, testing. The building will look finished from Collins Avenue well before anyone can actually move in.
That is the thing residents on this stretch should actually expect: the visual cue that construction has stopped will arrive well before the construction has stopped. Anyone timing their patience to the crane's disappearance is going to be off by close to a year.
Here is a quick side-by-side of where each project actually stands.
| The Sunny | Bentley Residences | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Reopened, fully operational | Under construction, structural phase |
| Key date | Reopened November 1, 2025 | Completion anticipated 2028 |
| What's there now | Lovebirds Coffee Bar, Citrus Shack, Sandbar beach bar, 340 rooms | Concrete superstructure at roughly 13 stories as of early August 2026 |
| What residents notice | A new walkable stop for coffee or a drink by the pier | Visible progress in real time, roughly a floor every five to six days |
What This Actually Changes About Your Walk Down Collins
If you live on this stretch, the practical version of all this is simple. The Sunny is already something you can use. Sandbar is open for a beach drink at the end of the day, Lovebirds is open for a coffee before a run, and none of that requires waiting on anything else to finish. That part of the neighborhood's clock already reset.
The Bentley Residences part has not reset yet and will not for a while. The staging area, the concrete deliveries, and the traffic patterns around 184th Street are going to be part of daily life on this block for another year or two at minimum, and the crane going quiet will not be the signal that it is over. If the announced pace holds into 2027, expect the visible construction to quiet down well before the actual completion date, and expect that quiet period itself to last a year or more.
Two projects, two timelines, one stretch of beach. The Sunny tells you what already changed. Bentley Residences tells you what is still becoming, on a schedule you can watch from your own balcony if you happen to be counting floors.
If you are thinking about how a specific address on this stretch of Sunny Isles Beach fits into a longer view, whether that is the pace of new construction nearby or what a reopened property like The Sunny actually adds to daily life here, Coltrane Miami Group knows this corridor block by block. Request a Confidential Consultation to talk through what any of this means for your own address.
