🚫 No Apocalypse Now

Happy Friday Highest & Best! Today we’re talking big numbers of everything.

Here’s the playlist:

📈 South Florida home listings are surging? Good.

💰 Billionaire laments NY wealth exodus — and moves to Florida

🌆 The luxury condo spigot is still flowing

Let’s get to it!

Put That Real Estate Apocalypse on Hold for Now

OH. MY. GAWD. Home listings in Florida are surging. Sales are falling.

And in many South Florida locales, home prices are…..hitting record highs?

📈 Florida had the biggest U.S. jump in sales listings last month with a 57% increase from the previous year, according to housing data site ResiClub.

🌀The biggest jumps were on Florida’s Gulf Coast, in areas like Naples and Fort Myers that were ravaged by Hurricane Ian in September 2022. Pricey reconstruction and mounting insurance costs are making homeownership there ever-more prohibitive. And the number of for-sale listings reflects that: there’s more of them now than there were before the pandemic.

📈 But home listings are rising in greater Miami, too. They’re up 34% in Miami, 40% in Fort Lauderdale and 19% in West Palm Beach, according to reports this month from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

🙃 Here comes the twist: even with those listing spikes, there’s still fewer properties to buy in the Miami metro region than there were before the pandemic. Also: Sale prices in those cities jumped to new records in the first three months of this year.

❗❗This suggests that the supply of homes in Southeast Florida is not yet high enough to meet the demand by those migrating to the region.

“The inventory is inadequate,” said Jonathan Miller, president of Miller Samuel.

“One of the best things to happen to the [South Florida] market is for more inventory to enter— to reduce bidding wars and to step back from the frenzy of the last three to four years,” he said.

Here’s some surprising South Florida findings from Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman’s reports on the first three months of 2024:

😲 In Boca Raton, single-family home prices hit a new record median of $975,000. Home listings also climbed — by 15% from a year ago. Still: there were 14% fewer homes for sale in Boca than there were in the first quarter of 2020, before the pandemic-fueled real estate frenzy.

😲 Fort Lauderdale— where single-family home listings surged 40%— also set new price records. Homes there sold for a median of $690,000 in the first quarter, or 19% more than they did a year ago. Nearly 11% of sales closed above the asking price.

😲 Miami Beach sales inventory is up 28% from last year. Sounds like a lot, but the city still has 43% fewer listings than it did in the first quarter of 2020, pre-pandemic. That could be why the median price of homes climbed 25% to a record $750,000.

😲 Oh, another price record: home prices in Jupiter hit a high watermark of $1.1 million in the quarter. This came as sales fell 3% and listings jumped 33%.

I could keep going with these price records —there are lots! — but you get the point.

So here’s just one more thing. The CEO Of publicly-traded homebuilder D.R. Horton was asked this week if he feared the rise of listings in Florida, where his firm is building homes.

Not really, he said:

⏪ Catch up on recent Highest & Best issues:

• Lux, Loss and Leasing, April 19, 2024

• Ritzy Foreclosure Suit, April 12, 2024

• Millionaire Must-Haves, April 5, 2024

💸 Movin’ on Down: New York hedge fund manager Larry Robbins announced that he and his family are moving to Florida. Robbins, the CEO of Glenview Capital Management, says he’s keeping his firm based in Manhattan, for now, and will commute there starting in August to abide by Glenview’s three-days-in-the-office policy, Bloomberg News reported.

Robbins, 54, whose estimated net worth is $2.2 billion, according to Forbes, bought a home in Palm Beach Gardens for $13.9 million in February. And he’s working with NHL legend Wayne Gretzky to build a $40 million ice hockey facility in his new home state.

The financier said the move was motivated by a better quality of life for his three young children, but lamented that his departure— the latest in an ongoing wealth exodus from New York — is a serious threat to the city, which relies on Wall Street affluence to balance its budget.

“I know of no business that has generated long term success by driving away its highest paying customers,” he told Bloomberg in an interview.

“Unless we solve the big problem of driving high earners away from New York City, this challenge will be a persistent headwind for decades to come,” he said. “The imbalance, the inequities, are in danger of growing.”

🏌️‍♂️Putting on the Ritz: A New York developer is reinventing a once-troubled West Palm Beach golf course into an exclusive location for relocated millionaires who want to hit the links near their pricey homes.

The Banyan Cay Resort & Golf will now be known as Dutchman’s Pipe Golf Club — and charge initiation fees as high as $350,000, developer Alex Witkoff told the Palm Beach Post.

The upscaling plans for the site include: re-designing an existing golf course that was built just seven years ago; adding a "holistic retreat" plus three restaurants; and completing a 150-room hotel that stalled under the previous owner’s financial troubles.

More Luxury Condos: They are A-coming

Seems that every week brings news of uber-pricey South Florida condos being planned, constructed or marketed. Here’s this week’s crop:

💰 $100 Million Living: A duplex penthouse in Miami— in a tower that won’t be complete until 2029— is being marketed now for $100 million. The planned 23,000-square-foot apartment will sit atop a tower at Residences at Mandarin Oriental, a two-building development on the island of Brickell Key that will start construction next year. The penthouse, which developer Swire Properties says can also be sold as two separate apartments, sits 780 feet above the ocean, has 30-foot ceilings, a private infinity pool, and comes with a garage that can fit eight vehicles.

💰 Dolce & Gabbana: New York builder JDS Development Group paid $61.2 million for a half-acre site (non-waterfront) in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood, according to property intel group Vizzda. The builder, with a pedigree that includes skyscrapers on Manhattan’s Billionaires’ Row, is planning a 90-story Dolce & Gabbana branded condo-hotel tower on the site. Prices at the project will start at $3.5 million and go over $35 million for the largest penthouse, a spokesperson said.

💰 More West Palm Chic: Nearly 200 more luxury condos are being planned in West Palm Beach on a site owned by a baptist church. Family Church will lease part of its sprawling — and scenically located — parking lot to New York developer Related Cos. which is seeking to build two residential towers of 32 and 28 stories, the Palm Beach Post reported. The church will use the lease proceeds to build a new school on the site.

That’s it for today!

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