By Darrell Hofheinz, Palm Beach Daily News
The town of Palm Beach bustled with an active real estate market last year for single-family homes, especially when it came to higher-end and trophy properties, according to a just-released round of fourth-quarter sales reports.
And things got even busier after the November presidential election once again put Palm Beach at “the center of the universe,” as broker Linda Olsson of Linda R. Olsson Inc. wrote in her sales report, referring to Donald Trump’s win and his subsequent encampment at his Mar-a-Lago Club in anticipation of Inauguration Day.
But the real estate story was far different for much of the island’s condominium and co-operative market. Some aging multifamily buildings struggled with sales, according to the fourth-quarter reports, several of which also summarized real estate activity for all of last year.
In all, sales of single-family properties in 2024 totaled $1.876 billion, down 1% from the $1.9 billion that sold in 2023, according to the report issued by Frisbie Palm Beach Real Estate, which is headed by Corcoran Group agent Suzanne Frisbie.
“Locally, the Palm Beach (single-family) real estate market has remained solid,” the Frisbie report said, with strong prices fetched for “premium properties,” including new or newly renovated homes and those facing the ocean or the Intracoastal Waterway.
The wealthy town, in fact, saw 10 sales in 2024 with recorded prices of $49 million or more, as previously reported by the Palm Beach Daily News. At the top of the list were the $150 million sale of a mega-mansion on private Tarpon Island and the $148 million sale of a landmarked oceanfront estate at 455 N. County Road.
But a noteworthy decrease in the dollars generated through multifamily sales townwide was telling, Frisbie’s report showed. In 2024, $420 million worth of condos and co-ops changed hands, down about 21% from the $531 milllion recorded the year before, according to Frisbie’s analysis, which was issued separately from a report prepared by the Corcoran Group.
With multifamily sales and single-family properties combined, Palm Beach saw $2.1 billion in sales during 2024, a drop from $2.4 billion recorded the prior year, Frisbie Real Estate’s report showed.
On Palm Beach’s condo/co-op scene
The challenge facing multifamily buildings was particularly apparent on the South End’s so-called “Condominium Row,” with many condo associations last year struggling to meet tougher state regulations for building inspections and for maintaining stockpiles of financial reserves. Those requirements came in the wake of the deadly 2022 condo collapse in Miam-Dade County’s Surfside community.
Complicating the sales picture for the local condo market have been volatile interest rates, rising insurance premiums and hefty assessments for owners.
Is it any wonder that the just-released sales reports from real estate agencies that do business on the island generally showed more condo owners have been putting their units up for sale?
The sales reports used different criteria and metrics to measure sales, so apples-to-apples comparisons among the them can be difficult. But several overall trends emerged, including the fact that overall condo sales fell sharply in year-over-year comparisons.
The number of sales in multi-family buildings townwide dropped to 267 last year from 311 in 2023, according to a year-end report prepared by agent Gary Pohrer of Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
Apartments on the South End fared the worst, while those in Midtown and the near North End — where units tend to be more expensive — did better. The latter saw a drop in sales from 71 in 2023 to 65 in 2024, Pohrer’s report showed.
And more condos entered the market in 2024 — up 30% in Pohrer’s year-over-year comparison.
The condos that did sell in the fourth quarter took longer to do so, according to the analysis prepared by the Corcoran Group. Condos that sold in October, November and December spent an average of 115 days on the market, compared to 94 days during the same in 2023, The Corcoran Report showed.
Ava Van de Water, whose regional duties at Brown Harris Stevens include running the agency’s Palm Beach offices, acknowledged that the overall numbers last year for condos and co-ops were down. But she has seen signs that things may be picking up, she told the Palm Beach Daily News in an email accompanying the release of the agency’s fourth-quarter sales report.
“The condo market slowed significantly in the fourth quarter in terms of the number of sales, but both the average and the median sale price increased. While the condo market remains somewhat soft, we are seeing signs of a resurgence,” Van de Water wrote.
On Palm Beach’s single-family scene
The news was brighter on the single-family front, where the number of sales recorded in 2023 and 2024 remained nearly unchanged, even though homebuyers had more choices available to them as inventory climbed. Yet the number of single-family homes on the market has yet to recover from the sales boom that accompanied the early years of the coronavirus pandemic, when a rush of buyers left far fewer options for sale.
Inventory “reached new highs” in 2024, Pohrer wrote in his report, “with anywhere from 80 to 100 active listings across single-family home properties.”
The increased choices, Pohrer added, led to an increase in so-called “price discovery, with buyers testing the waters by making offers well below the last asking price, and acceptance rates often coming in 20% to 25% below the original asking price.”
The prices buyers paid per square foot for non-waterfront single-family properties weakened, Pohrer wrote. But that wasn’t the case for waterfront “trophy properties” he added, which continued to see stronger average sale prices and prices paid per square foot — no surprise, really, “given the scarce nature of the asset.”
Jessica Shapiro, brokerage manager at Sotheby’s International Realty, also took note of a “big increase in inventory” as Palm Beach entered the fourth quarter, she said in an email to the Palm Beach Daily News when her agency’s new sales report was released.
“But the increase in demand and pending deals have quickly brought the (inventory) figure back down to levels seen through most of 2024,” Shapiro wrote.
Whatever they have found on the market, many buyers wealthy enough to shop in Palm Beach have seen their incomes rise thanks to Wall Street’s continued bullish performance, said analyst Jonathan Miller, who prepares sales reports for Douglas Elliman Real Estate. Because those buyers also tend to pay cash for their real estate, they are likely less affected by rising interest rates, Miller said in a phone interview with the Palm Beach Daily News coinciding with the release of Elliman’s fourth-quarter analysis.
Those buyers’ intentions also may have been buoyed after the uncertainty surrounding the 2024 election cycle receded with Trump’s win in early November, said Miller, who is president of Miller Samuel Inc. In New York City.
“The release of the election (uncertainty) has been very favorable for high-end markets,” Miller said. “We’re seeing more activity post-election, but we’re also seeing the higher end outperform the lower end.”
He added: “Palm Beach was one of the better-performing housing markets in Florida that we tracked” during the fourth quarter.
The Elliman Report showed that the median single-family sale price in Palm Beach rose in October, November and December in a year-over-year comparison — from $8.75 million in 2023 to $10.88 million in 2024. And of the top 10% of sales, pricewise, the median single-family sale price jumped in the fourth quarter from about $15.38 million to about $34.4 million in an annual comparison. The median price is the one at which half of the properties sold for more and half sold for less.
The median was skewed, however, by a notable outlier, when an oceanfront estate at 1446 N. Ocean Blvd changed hands for $81 million in November. That was the highest recorded deal of the fourth quarter in Palm Beach, according to sales tracked by the Rabideau Klein law firm.
The report from the Corcoran Group summed up the fourth-quarter sales picture succinctly. “As 2024 came to a close,” The Corcoran Report said, “Palm Beach experienced a dynamic real estate market with steady single-family home sales, a notable rise across all pricing metrics, and a significant shift in condo/co-op transactions at the high end, despite a decline in overall closings.”