At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, wealthy New Yorkers eager to escape the confines of the Big Apple fled south toward the tony, sun-soaked island of Palm Beach, FL—sparking a migration trend that has continued ever since, sending local home prices skyrocketing in the process.
As demand for homes on the barrier island surged, it caused not only a significant surge in the median property price but also prompted a notable drop in available inventory.
“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 median home price in the luxury town, which has a population of fewer than 10,000, peaked at an eye-watering $4.15 million in April 2022 after years of growth, according to Jones.
Although the median asking price has since slipped, it remains well above 2019 levels.
“Despite improvement, home prices remain well above pre-pandemic levels in Palm Beach as the effects of pandemic-era demand persist,” adds Jones.
And the deep-pocketed residents of the Empire State are largely responsible for Palm Beach’s stratospheric home prices, according to experts.
“It’s a wealth migration from New York City,” Ana Bozovic, a Miami-based real estate agent and founder of Analytics Miami, tells Realtor.com, addressing the unprecedented changes in Palm Beach.
A ‘supercharged’ southern migration begins
In 2019, months before the first-known cases of COVID-19 started showing up in U.S. cities, a scant 6.5% of listing views in Palm Beach County came from New York, according to a data analysis by Realtor.com.
However, by 2021, the pandemic had tightened its grip on New York City, overwhelming its hospitals and leaving residents inside the often-limited confines of their homes. So, the high net-worth individuals who were able to do so began casting covetous glances toward Palm Beach, pushing up that share of listing views to 8.1%.
Evidently, New Yorkers liked what the saw down South because the interest in Palm Beach’s real estate continued to grow in the ensuing years, even as the pandemic slowly receded into the past.
“What COVID did was it supercharged migration to South Florida, so it accelerated trends that were already in place,” explains Bozovic.
In 2023, the share of listing views from New York reached an all-time high of 19.6%, meaning that 1 in 5 potential homebuyers were from the Empire State.
“New York State contributed the most out-of-state demand to listings in Palm Beach County each year, from 2019 through 2024,” according to Jones.
A study of driver’s license data carried out by The Palm Beach Post in 2023 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 figure standing at 8,059 in 2022 alone.
Bozovic cited another data set that came out in in 2021, which indicated 41% of the transplants to Palm Beach County that year came from New York City.
And, when the IRS parsed the data that year, it emerged that the Manhattan residents who relocated to Palm Beach County on the heels of COVID-19 all had one thing in common: wealth, with an average annual income of $728,000.
Reshaping the South Florida real estate market
“Entrepreneurship always flows to some new place, and New York was the capital of the 20th century, post-World War II, pre-Internet era,” Bozovic says. “Now, there’s a new era coming, and COVID broke habits long enough to allow the formation of new ones; and it’s sort of supercharged these migration patterns.”
Bozovic points out that what’s been happening in Palm Beach is part of a wider trend that has been reshaping the real estate market of South Florida since the pandemic.
“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 it closely mirrors what she has been seeing in Miami, where the availability of any single-family home below $500,000 has plummeted since 2019.
The scarcity of affordable homes in Palm Beach County and Miami comes down to two closely related factors, according to Bozovic.
“It is not possible to build new product at that price point due to land cost and construction cost, so nothing new at prime locations will be delivered to replace things that have been [there] but have appreciated,” she explains.
The history of the median home listing prices in Palm Beach closely follows the trajectory of New Yorkers’ frenzied interest in the island’s luxe properties and, according to Bozovic, that is no coincidence.
Between September 2019 and January 2025, the median listing price in Palm Beach nearly doubled, increasing from $1.5 million to $2.9 million.
During the same period, the inventory of Palm Beach homes with an asking price of more than $1 million dropped by half, from 313 to 137.
Bozovic says when she looked at the figures, what struck her was the explosion of sales of luxury homes at $2,000 per square foot in Palm Beach County. Those transactions soared by 640% from 2019 to 2024.
During the same period, sales of ultraluxe properties valued at a minimum of $20 million surged 500%.
In January 2025 alone, Bozovic says six homes had sold for more than $20 million. For comparison, there were just five sales at that price point for the entire year of 2019.
While Bozovic concedes that moneyed New Yorkers are not solely to blame for the staggering price increases on Palm Beach real estate, she says they are are unquestionably “an important piece of the puzzle” because, she argues, they “created an appetite for product price points that basically didn’t exist before.”