Palm Beach buyers have always come from the Northeast — affluent families journey from New York, Connecticut and New Jersey to the island for tropical refuge. Now, agents say a new crowd is coming to town: the Californians.
“Over the last 12 months I’ve seen more buyers from California than I’ve ever seen,” said Palm Beach County agent Nick Malinosky of Douglas Elliman’s Exclusive Group, a team he founded with Gary Pohrer and Devin Kay. He’s been selling homes in the area for 20 years.
“The first 15 [years] I had never worked with a buyer from California,” he said.
That started to change during the pandemic. Perhaps the most well-known Californian relocation was billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who spent a record $173 million on a 16-acre Manalapan estate in 2022. Harvey Jones, a longtime Nvidia board member and newly minted billionaire, bought and homesteaded a waterfront Palm Beach estate for $74.3 million last year.
Reading the tea leaves, the Hilton family, famed Beverly Hills residents, expanded their namesake residential brokerage to Palm Beach. Barron and Tessa Hilton have settled on the island as they set up shop. Sylvester Stallone, another longtime Los Angeles resident, bought a waterfront Palm Beach home for $35.4 million in 2020, and announced last year he was relocating full time, according to published reports.
Brokers say this coast-to-coast transplanting trend is escalating. Agents credit the sudden influx to a few factors: fires, politics, taxes and business.
Brokers say they’ve gotten calls from people affected by the Palisades and Altadena fires that devastated Los Angeles earlier this year, often looking for rentals where they can rebuild their lives. Fire victims don’t represent the majority of Californians coming to Palm Beach County, though.
Politics is also playing a role, agents say. Palm Beach County is obviously the epicenter of President Trump’s political movement, as the home of his Mar-a-Lago Club where much of his politicking and dealmaking unfold. While it looms large in the public mind as a Republican stomping ground, the county itself is quite purple. Kamala Harris won the county with 49.9 percent of the vote, and Trump took 49.2 percent.
“They’re pretty much centrists, most of them,” Pohrer said of the Californian clients he is working with. “There were just some political things where they didn’t feel like they could express their freedoms.”
Financial drivers
For many of the California buyers coming to Palm Beach County, the move has more to do with dollars and cents. Florida’s tax code is much more wallet-friendly than California’s, with no state income taxes, and it is considered one of the most business-friendly states in the nation.
“It’s very easy to ramp up here,” said Kelly Smallridge, president and CEO of the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County. “The business circles are so open because no one is from here. I have literally seen people come here from other states and become mayor in four years.”
Dana Koch, an agent with the Corcoran Group in Palm Beach, said he has a California client relocating his business to West Palm Beach. It’s taken Californians a while to catch wind of Palm Beach County, according to Koch. “Most of them have heard of Palm Beach, but they have no idea what it is,” he said.
Californians weren’t really interested in alternative living situations until the more recent pileup of challenges facing the state: in addition to the fires, housing and cost-of-living crises.
“It’s been really hard to compete with California in the past,” Smallridge said. “Californians really love their lifestyle.”
But so do Palm Beachers.
“It’s probably one of the best lifestyles in the country,” said Margit Brandt, an agent with Premier Estate Properties. She said the region’s real estate boom, coupled with the presidential spotlight, have helped to elevate the area’s profile in wealthy circles around the country.
The slew of tech billionaires who pilgrimaged to Mar-a-Lago during the presidential transition put Palm Beach on Silicon Valley’s radar. Senada Adžem, a Boca Raton-based agent with Douglas Elliman, said she’s seen an uptick in West Coast clients moving their tech businesses to Palm Beach County.
“The redevelopment of West Palm Beach is playing into this,” she said. “There’s really good office spaces they can find.”
That’s thanks to billionaire developer Steve Ross, who is building millions of square feet of office space for “Wall Street South.” He has already completed the 20-story 360 Rosemary building and the 25-story One Flagler office tower. He is also planning 10 CityPlace and 15 CityPlace, each spanning 430,000 square feet.
Smallridge and the Business Development Board of Palm Beach County are ramping up efforts to woo Silicon Valley. She advocated for Vanderbilt University’s proposal for a $520 million tech- and business-focused graduate campus in West Palm Beach, which won approval in October.
“We’ve done it before with Wall Street South, we can do it again,” she said. Plus, “They also believe the real estate is a lot cheaper.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
