While much of Florida’s property market cools, Palm Beach continues to outperform. Ruth Bloomfield explores how scarcity, tax advantages and a steady influx of ultra-wealthy buyers are keeping prices buoyant...
It has been a gloomy year for property in the Sunshine State, but even in straitened times Florida’s most rarefied enclave sparkles. Palm Beach is showing remarkable resilience to wider market trends, and while there has certainly been a slowdown since the height of Covid-19, prices and transaction numbers continue to rise as well-heeled buyers continue to gravitate towards the lifestyle, safety and low-tax regime to be found in President Trump’s adopted hometown.
“Palm Beach is a bubble,” says Dana Koch, realtor associate at estate agent Corcoran. “People gravitate to environments where there is safety and quality of life, and Palm Beach is beautiful and we are well protected. When you walk out of your front door you feel safe.”
According to the Miami Association of Realtors (MAR), residential sales across Palm Beach County surged in the final quarter of 2025, up almost 20 per cent year-on-year. The median price of single family homes across the county held steady at just over $605,000 (£443,000), while condo prices rose by 3.2 per cent.
Of course, you won’t buy a house on Palm Beach island for $605,000 – “a 10,000-square-foot [930-square-metre] plot of land would cost around $5 million,” estimates Koch, while estate agent Savills rates the island as one of the most expensive stretches of real estate in the world at almost $43,000 per square metre, outdone only by homes in Monaco or Aspen.
Despite global economic belt-tightening, the number of $10-million-plus homes sold on Palm Beach in 2025 was the second-highest on record, only slightly behind the race-for-space of 2021. There have been some mind-boggling deals, including coffee magnate Robert Stiller selling his home for just over $66 million over Christmas.
Koch attributes Palm Beach’s resilience in part to its shortage of stock – there are only around 2,200 homes on the island, he says, and few if any owners are ever forced to sell their homes at knock-down prices. Demand, meanwhile, is strong, notably coming from high-tax states such as California and Illinois, as well as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Koch believes these latter buyers are seeking not only sunshine, but a Republican-voting community. More than half of incomers, he estimates, are buying a main home rather than a holiday pad.
“The low taxes mean that establishing residency in Florida can pay for the house,” says John Cregan, global real estate advisor at Sotheby’s International Realty. “There are a lot of wealthy US people who probably live in states with worse weather or higher taxes, or both.”
Of course, the Florida slowdown has been felt in Palm Beach. Homes took slightly longer to sell than at the peak of the market in 2021, said the MAR, and average discounts were six per cent off list price for houses, and eight per cent for apartments.
On the mainland, meanwhile, West Palm Beach has been transformed over the past decade from backwater to urban hotspot, according to a separate report from market analyst Redfin. As a result, it has seen faster price growth (187.3 per cent) than anywhere else in the US, with median sale prices topping the $4 million mark.
This is partly because West Palm Beach is hugely attractive to a community of hedge-fund managers, private equity partners and family offices who are setting up shop close to where their wealthy clients live.
The waterfront West Palm Beach is now filled with high-end apartment buildings, led by The Bristol, completed in 2019. Its popularity, says Cregan, has inspired a luxury property building boom in the city, easily breaching local price ceilings. A modern two-bedroom, two-bathroom waterfront apartment in a smart building in West Palm Beach sells for anywhere between $3.5 and $5 million, while a more dated 1980s apartment would fetch from $1.5 million.
Koch agrees West Palm Beach is evolving fast, “especially the east part of West Palm Beach; those neighbourhoods are becoming extremely popular because you get more bang for your buck – a four- bedroom house would cost around $4 million – and you’ve got close proximity to airports, retail and restaurants, and Palm Beach [proper] is only a hop, skip and a jump away.”
The Teflon performance of Palm Beach as a whole is particularly impressive when set against the wider Florida context. The deluge of buyers who flooded into the state in the early years of the pandemic has dried up. As a result, the Gulf Coast metropolitan area around Tampa Bay saw prices fall almost nine per cent in the past year, according to realtor.com, while Cape Coral-Fort Myers is down 7.9 per cent.
As to the future? “There have been a lot of big-ticket sales, and that breeds confidence in the lower levels of the market,” says Koch.
Cregan agrees. “We’re really busy right now and there is relatively limited inventory in the single-family house market,” he said, confirming his stance that Palm Beach will continue to flourish.
Read More/Sunny side up: A tale of two markets in Fort LauderdaleFirst published in the April 2026 issue of BOAT International. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.