The Setai Miami Beach has two sets of owners. The hotel portion belongs to the Nakash family, the founders of Jordache jeans, through their investment arm Nakash Holdings, in partnership with financier Alex von Furstenberg and his family. The 163 luxury units in the property’s 40-story oceanfront residential tower are owned individually by the people who bought them, each holding a separate deed. So the answer to who owns The Setai Miami depends on which part of the property you mean.
Who Bought the Hotel and When
Nakash Holdings acquired the hotel component from a Lehman Brothers subsidiary for about $90 million, with the deal announced in late 2014. The purchase covered roughly 120 hotel keys, the common areas, and the amenities inside the lower eight-story building, an Art Deco structure originally built in the late 1930s as the Jack Dempsey-Vanderbilt Hotel. Alex von Furstenberg and his family came in as partners on the transaction.1PR Newswire. The Setai Miami Beach Announces New Ownership The exact split between the two families hasn’t been publicly disclosed, though Nakash Holdings has consistently been identified as the lead entity.
The Nakash family was already a major presence on Miami Beach before this deal. In 2013, they acquired the former Versace Mansion, Casa Casuarina, for $41.5 million at auction. Between that property and The Setai, the family controls some of the most recognizable addresses in South Beach.
Who Owns the Residential Tower
The Setai isn’t a single property with one owner. It operates under a condo-hotel framework that separates the commercial hotel from a residential tower. The 40-story oceanfront tower holds 163 individually owned luxury units, starting above the parking levels on the 11th floor and rising through two-story “townhouses in the sky” to penthouses with private infinity pools.2Skanska. The Setai Hotel and Residence
Each residential unit owner holds fee simple title to their specific space, recorded through an individual deed in Miami-Dade County. These owners can sell, lease, or occupy their units according to the condominium’s governing documents. Their ownership is entirely separate from the Nakash family’s hotel holdings.
Many condo-hotel properties like The Setai offer rental pool programs where unit owners can place their residences into the hotel’s booking system when they’re not using them personally. In those arrangements, the hotel operator typically keeps 25 to 50 percent of gross room revenue in exchange for handling bookings, housekeeping, and guest services. Whether participation is mandatory or optional comes down to the specific condominium’s governing documents and the terms of the rental program.
The Condominium Association
The Setai Hotel Silver Condominium Association governs the collective interests of the residential unit owners. It oversees maintenance of shared spaces, sets monthly assessments, manages the building’s budget, and enforces community rules. Monthly assessments at luxury condo-hotels of this caliber commonly run several thousand dollars, covering lobby upkeep, pool maintenance, security, and insurance.
Florida’s Condominium Act, codified in Chapter 718 of the Florida Statutes, regulates how these associations must operate. The law requires associations to follow specific financial reporting standards, provide disclosure documents to prospective buyers, and hold regular board elections.3Florida Senate. Florida Code Chapter 718 – Condominiums Unit owners who disagree with board decisions on assessments or maintenance can invoke the dispute resolution procedures the statute lays out. For a property at this price level, where a single special assessment could run into five figures, those rights carry real weight.
Why the Hotel Operator Isn’t the Owner
The company running the hotel day-to-day is not the same as the people who own the real estate, and The Setai’s history makes that clear. General Hotel Management, the hospitality company that helped develop the property’s original Asian-inspired luxury identity, managed the hotel for years. That relationship ended in 2012 when the then-owners terminated GHM’s contract and brought in Trevi Luxury Hospitality Group. The Nakash family’s 2014 acquisition triggered another management transition, with operations brought under the family’s own hospitality oversight.
Separating ownership from management is standard practice in high-end hotels. The property owner controls the real estate asset and capital decisions, while the management company handles staffing, guest services, marketing, and daily operations. Management contracts in luxury hospitality typically pay the operating company a base fee of 2 to 4 percent of gross revenue, with 3 percent most common, and many agreements add incentive fees tied to performance once the hotel’s adjusted operating profit clears a specified return threshold.
That split structure also shapes employment liability. Courts have found that management companies can be treated as joint employers of hotel staff when they control hiring, firing, compensation, and daily work direction. For an owner like the Nakash family, carefully structuring the management contract to define those boundaries helps limit exposure to employment claims that would otherwise flow to the property owner.
The Short Version
If you’re asking about the hotel itself, the owners are the Nakash family through Nakash Holdings, with the von Furstenberg family as partners, since the late-2014 purchase from a Lehman Brothers subsidiary. If you’re asking about a specific residence in the tower, the owner is whoever holds the recorded deed to that unit, governed collectively through The Setai Hotel Silver Condominium Association. Hotel brand and management arrangements have changed more than once; the underlying ownership is what the deeds show.