- Tech IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are fueling a luxury real estate boom in Florida and the Hamptons.
- Record-breaking sales, like a $225 million Naples home, show prices climbing due to limited beachfront property.
- New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comments on private property amplify demand for Florida.
Satellites aren’t the only thing skyrocketing.
Over the holiday weekend, as many New Yorkers were rained in, some soon-to-be centimillionaires and billionaires were scouting real estate in Florida and the Hamptons. They were expecting big paydays with IPOs for SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI on the horizon.
Real estate firms are preparing to meet their needs.
“It used to be we’d plan our seasonality around Wall Street — we’d list [big properties] right around bonus season,” Ryan Serhant, founder and CEO of Serhant, told me. “These tech IPOs are how we plan now.”
And while the ultra-rich are getting richer, the beachfront property in places like Miami and Palm Beach stays limited. So, prices just keep climbing.
In 2021, the most expensive home to ever sell in Florida closed for approximately $130 million in Palm Beach.
Since then, nine-figure sale prices have become more common. Last year, 10 homes in the US sold for more than $100 million, with a Naples, Fla. home going for $225 million. In 2024, there were seven homes in the country that sold for nine figures.
This story is part of NYNext, an indispensable insider insight into the innovations, moonshots and political chess moves that matter most to NYC’s power players (and those who aspire to be).
Nathan Zeder, a top Florida agent with The Jills Zeder Group who has closed multiple nine-figure deals, says demand is off the charts. “We’ve had a ton of people looking and a great start to the year,” he told me. “The amount of wealth about to be generated will be enormous.”
Meanwhile, San Francisco, luxury home sales jumped 22% year-over-year in early 2026, with the median price for a luxury home nearing a new high of $6.8 million.
Even traditionally quieter luxury pockets like Montana and other Western ranch markets are seeing strong demand, particularly from tech buyers seeking large land tracts with room for private airstrips and future development.
Serhant has adapted his marketing approach to match the speed of this new buyer class. “We used to do longer-form marketing tours — long YouTube property tours because it would take longer to sell,” he explained. Now he’s uploading quick iPhone videos to Instagram stories, TikTok and in group chats. Properties that once took months to move now sell in a matter of days with all-cash offers.
That demand has only been amplified by recent comments from New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has flirted with abolishing private property for landlords — just in case anyone needed more of a push to head south.
“If you want to be in a low-tax, business-friendly state, on the ocean, with a better time zone to Europe, there’s nowhere else,” Serhant said of Florida.
