Wealthy New Yorkers Migrate to Palm Beach, Leading to Surge in Home Prices

By: Ilana Siyance

Well-heeled New Yorkers began leaving the Empire State for South Florida’s warm beaches at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. This has now proven not to have been just a fleeting trend, but a continuous migration. Palm Beach, Florida has received a good deal of the fleeting New Yorkers, leading their home prices to skyrocket. As reported by the NY Post, there has been a significant drop in available housing inventory in the neighborhood, and the median price for residential properties has surged.

“Palm Beach saw a massive uptick in housing demand during the pandemic, which drove home prices higher and inventory levels lower,” says Realtor.com® senior data analyst Hannah Jones. The small luxury town, which has a population of less than 10,000, saw its median home price peak at a whopping $4.15 million in April 2022, Jones said. Though the figure has slipped below that high, the median continues to remain way above 2019 prices. “Despite improvement, home prices remain well above pre-pandemic levels in Palm Beach as the effects of pandemic-era demand persist,” added Jones.

Experts attest that Palm Beach’s surging home prices are indeed the result of incoming New York residents. “It’s a wealth migration from New York City,” Ana Bozovic, a Miami-based real estate agent and founder of Analytics Miami, told Realtor.com. Before the pandemic, in 2019, a mere 6.5% of listing views in Palm Beach County came from New York, as per a data analysis by Realtor.com. By 2021, over 8% of Palm Beach listing views came for New York.

Whether it was the sunny skies or the lower income taxes, that number continued to rise, with continued migration even after the pandemic’s end. “What COVID did was it supercharged migration to South Florida, so it accelerated trends that were already in place,” said Bozovic. In 2023, Palm Beach home listing views from New York reached an all-time high of 19.6%— meaning that 1 in 5 potential homebuyers were from New York. “New York State contributed the most out-of-state demand to listings in Palm Beach County each year, from 2019 through 2024,” said Jones.

Further proof can be seen from a study of driver’s license data carried out by The Palm Beach Post in 2023. The study showed that New Yorkers led the way for the most newcomers to Palm Beach County who were turning in their non-Florida licenses, with that number at 8,059 in 2022. Per the Post, Bozovic cited other data from 2021, which showed that 41% of Palm Beach County’s new comers came from NYC. IRS data for the year also showed they were wealthy individuals doing the migrating— with an average annual income of $728,000.

“In Palm Beach County in 2024, the median single-family home price was $665,000. In 2019, it was $370,000. That is an increase of 89%,” Bozovic says, adding that in Miami too availability of any single-family home below $500,000 has become scarce since 2019.

Between September 2019 and January 2025, the median listing price in Palm Beach nearly doubled, jumping to $2.9 million from $1.5 million. Bozovic added that from 2019 to 2024, sales of ultraluxe properties valued at a minimum of $20 million swelled by 500%. In the one month of January 2025 alone, Bozovic says six homes sold for more than $20 million.