$100 Million Homes Are the New Frontier for South Florida Real Estate

• The Miami area in September saw its first $100 million residential-real-estate sale.
• Citadel CEO Ken Griffin’s buy is a market-defining moment for ultraluxury real estate in Florida.
• Miami homes are still in short supply, keeping pressure on both luxury and nonluxury home prices.

In early September, the hedge-fund billionaire Ken Griffin dropped just shy of $107 million on a 4-acre property in the ritzy Miami enclave of Coconut Grove. The estate includes a Mediterranean Revival-style mansion that dates to 1913 and a second, newer mansion built in 1999.

Griffin is moving the headquarters of his $50 billion-plus fund, Citadel, to Miami, and he’ll have plenty of room to get used to it in his new home— 20,000 square feet of living space, to be exact.

His purchase may have been the first single-family home in South Florida to sell for a staggering nine figures, but buyers in that tax bracket should get comfortable with the figure.

One of South Florida’s top-selling brokers, Dina Goldentayer, says it’s a new benchmark for ultraluxury real estate in South Florida and exemplifies just how high the market has flown since the start of the pandemic. Goldentayer, who shared a typical day in her life with Insider earlier this year, shows properties to high-net-worth clients via chauffeured car, helicopter, and golf cart.

Griffin’s $100 million buy is more than double the 2019 record for Miami’s priciest single-family home. In that year, a 2-acre estate on Indian Creek Island Road with a 20,000-square-foot house with 10 bedrooms and 14 bathrooms traded for $50 million.

Now an oceanfront home in Golden Beach, a small barrier island just north of Sunny Isles Beach, is seeking $100 million — and it’s being sold as a gut job.

The 30,000-square-foot home is represented by Goldentayer and Ryan Serhant and being sold with approved plans for a remodel. It’s a big bet on the state of the Miami market, but from Goldentayer’s well-connected perch as Douglas Elliman’s biggest seller in 2021, having transacted over $750 million in deals, she believes there’s a buyer out there for it, she said.

Mike Ruiz

As Miami grows as a center of tech and finance, with Citadel relocating its headquarters from Chicago and Big Law following in its wake, wealth is flowing into the Magic City, and the real-estate industry is leaning in.

The demand for showstopper Miami homes just keeps growing, Goldentayer told Insider.

“Miami’s coming off the hottest ultraluxury summer ever,” Goldentayer said, adding that the warmer months, which are traditionally slower for the area’s real-estate market, saw two sales totaling $78 million to the Bezos family in Coral Gables, a $93 million assemblage to the tech entrepreneur Phillip Ragon in Golden Beach, and the $106.87 million Griffin purchase in Coconut Grove.

“For this top end of the market, the trajectory is up,” she said.

The housing-market analyst Jonathan Miller said the South Florida ultraluxury market, once confined to West Palm Beach, had gotten a boost from the pandemic and remote work, which has helped it spread to places like Coral Gables and Miami.

“Now $100 million seems to be the threshold that captures the public’s imagination. That threshold used to be $25 million, $30 million,” he said.

While Miami’s ultraluxury market thrives, its less-pricey sectors are beginning to normalize, Miller said.

Douglas Elliman’s South Florida market reports, which Miller compiles, point to a slowdown in new signed contracts, but that’s in comparison with the supercharged market of 2021. The availability of housing is still in short supply, keeping pressure on prices across the board.

Redfin’s second-quarter luxury-housing-market analysis found that while home sales fell nearly 56% from the same time last year in Miami, the median sales price rose 27.3% to $2.8 million.

Still, the implication of Miami’s recent blockbuster purchases is huge.

“Once you’ve hit a milestone, you usually just keep going,” Goldentayer said. “So for Miami to hit $100 million-plus is just incredible.”