In Miami, renting an apartment always had a certain appeal, and was marketed—with reservations—towards tourists. Renting for the winter season was a halfway point between hotels and owning property. A renter was already someone who came to Miami Beach but who wasn’t ready, or perhaps couldn’t afford, to commit to purchasing.
It was a strange middle-space that ad-men marketed to with pretty ads, showing the beautiful spaces one could occupy, but without full embrace, and always next to the much flashier, much bigger, and much more glamorous ads of those spaces one could own. We tore through old issues of the Miami News on the Google News Archives. So here we present, without further ado, a selection of apartment advertisements from some key boom times in Miami’s history, the 20s, the 40s, and the 50s.
A ceiling fan, gas heating, closet space, jalousies!
The Carl T. Fisher company, builders of Miami Beach, which placed many, many luscious advertisements for land for sale, limited their rental advertisements to modest, one column listings in the classified section. Bias much?
It’s a ‘cooperative apartment’, a.k.a. a Co-op, not actually a rental and a total rarity in Miami.
Towards the middle of the century oceanfront, and near-to-oceanfront apartments became more common. An extension of the resort hotel experience, the resort ‘apartment’ duplicated the hotel but one lived there on a longer term basis. You’d rent an apartment for the season, or perhaps buy a condo.
The real money was always, of course, in real estate for purchase, not rent. From the beginning realtors and builders knew this. Although you could rent a garden apartment in Coral Gables, what they really wanted you to do was buy. The Biltmore wasn’t built in the middle of a residential neighborhood for nothing.
http://miami.curbed.com/archives/2013/11/18/dive-into-rental-listings-across-miamis-history.php