Palm Beach County’s priciest residential deals tend to close off-market, and 2025 was no exception.
Among the biggest? Billionaire Charles Simonyi, the early Microsoft employee credited with inventing Word and Excel, paid more than $160 million to acquire an undeveloped Palm Beach lot on the ocean. The seller was beauty heir William Lauder. Simonyi’s purchase was, obviously, an off-market deal, with no trail of public records. It is also part of his larger $350 million-plus assemblage on the island, sources say.
If he successfully completes rumored deals to acquire the oceanfront homes of Jon Bon Jovi and casino mogul William Rickman Jr., his land could become one of the most valuable private estates in the country.
The deal is reflective of the area’s pull on America’s billionaires and centimillionaires, whose continued inward migration has sustained unprecedented price growth and record deals in Palm Beach and beyond.
“There truly is an exodus of wealth that is looking for a new home,” Margit Brandt of Premier Estate Properties said.
“We’re dealing with a lot of these sort of small-pocket neighborhoods with limited inventory by nature.”
It also shows how hard it is to see the whole picture. Off-market deals can’t be reliably tracked so are not included in the ranking.
Still, the top 25 agent teams in Palm Beach County closed $7.1 billion in on-market deals, according to The Real Deal’s analysis of sales in the 12-month period ending on Jan. 20, 2026. That’s up from the $6.1 billion of on-market sales measured in the previous year’s ranking.
The same players dominated the list. Christian Angle with Christian Angle Real Estate topped the list with $673.4 million in sales. Senada Adžem with Douglas Elliman ranked second with $485.4 million. Corcoran’s Dana Koch rocketed up to third with $452.6 million. Douglas Elliman’s Exclusive Group, led by Nick Malinosky and Devin Kay, landed in fourth with $402.8 million. David Roberts, broker and owner of Royal Palm Properties, placed in fifth with $385.8 million.
Brokers by and large said it was one of their best years since the crush of deals during the pandemic craze. Similarly to the market then, broader global forces molded the Palm Beach County residential market.
Behind the numbers
The busy season for Palm Beach real estate runs from about Thanksgiving to Memorial Day. Donald Trump’s re-election in November 2024 unleashed a fervor that continued into 2025. Luxury contracts spiked in a phenomenon dubbed the “Trump bump,” and sales within the Mar-a-Lago Security Zone jumped.
“Once Trump won the election in ’24, there was so much optimism going into ’25. It was going gangbusters,” Koch said. But, “tariff talk dampened that.”
A Knight Frank report showed $1.4 billion in closed sales of $10 million or more in the first quarter of 2025 in Palm Beach, and in the second quarter, a drop in dollar volume to just $594 million.
Sales recovered as Trump backed away from the most extreme tariff policies and markets absorbed the new monetary policy shock. Buyers adjusted, and deals picked up again, agents said.
By and large, the $30 million-and-up market performed the strongest of any price segment in 2025.
“That was a really busy market segment for us,” Adžem said.
Overall, she sees more consistency in the market. “Sales prices have stabilized. It’s more sober decision making that I’m seeing,” she said.
Luxury sprawl
The very top of the market boomed this year, expanding farther outside of the town of Palm Beach.
In years past, the most expensive sales stayed concentrated on the island of Palm Beach, a legacy wealth hub that has long been the site of trophy estates. But as prices there have ballooned, the richest buyers are considering the appeal of nearby markets. Agents say the spotlight on the market has raised the profile of areas like Manalapan, Jupiter and North Palm Beach, particularly for luxe gated communities.
Some of these deals have set records. Fintech billionaire Ronald Clarke dropped $97.5 million to acquire William Wrigley Jr.’s waterfront Lost Tree Village compound. A member of the Cafaro real estate family paid $50.5 million for a spec estate in Stone Creek Ranch from developer Aldo Stark. The retired head of Patrón Spirits, Edward Brown, sold his Bear’s Club estate in Jupiter for a record $48 million.
“We’re dealing with a lot of these sort of small-pocket neighborhoods with limited inventory by nature,” Malinosky said.
Malinosky noted that the supply constraint in small markets like Manalapan, where he has a $285 million listing for an oceanfront spec estate, is driving record prices.
Blue state blues
The other factor helping to drive sales and prices is blue state politics catalyzing additional migration. Zohran Mamdani’s political rise in New York City, cemented in June when he won the Democratic mayoral primary, had brokers predicting a new wave of migration to South Florida on par with the pandemic. That’s not how it panned out.
“I think the Mamdani thing was nonsense,” said Serhant’s Gary Pohrer, who ranked 12th. “That didn’t do anything. That was basically realtors trying to get in the news.” Pohrer’s dollar volume for the past year includes deals he was involved in while he was part of the Exclusive Group at Elliman. Pohrer moved to Serhant in May.
New Yorkers are still a dominant component of the buyer demographic, but agents said the biggest influx of buyers from blue states came from California. They pointed to the fires in Los Angeles as well as the Golden State’s proposed 5 percent wealth tax as catalyzing the migration.
“States like California, I’m happy to say it, are literally kicking their wealthy residents out through tax and regulation,” said Malinosky.
Roberts called California Governor Gavin Newsom Florida real estate’s top booster. But others tempered the impact.
“There are definitely Californians who are dipping their toes in the water,” Koch said. “I haven’t seen any of them make the big purchases.”
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