The $78.9 Million Question: The Bristol’s 2026 Report Card

Market Reports

The $78.9 Million Question: The Bristol’s 2026 Report Card

Nikko Karki
Nikko Karki August 15, 2026
Two numbers describe The Bristol in 2026 and they point in opposite directions. The building's newest closing printed at $3,503 per square foot, the second highest price per foot in its history. And the building's newest asking prices sit as much as 44 percent above the highest price any buyer has ever actually paid. Between those two numbers sits a $78.9 million penthouse, the largest offering West Palm Beach's benchmark tower has ever carried, and the question that names this report.
Resales since 2022
12
Every one eventually closed
The floor, per sf
$2,786
Untouched since 2022
Median resale, per sf
$3,253
Across the twelve trades
Median time to sell
296 days
2024 through 2026 closings

The Tape

Every resale since 2022, from the MLS record. The April closing of unit 1801 at $19,420,500 is the newest line, and at $3,503 per square foot it trails only the $3,788 paid for unit 1901 in early 2023. Read down the days column and the story of the last two years appears before any arithmetic: campaigns lengthen, prints hold. The full history from the building's 2018 opening is documented in our complete sales study.

Every Bristol resale since 2022
Closed price, price per foot, and the campaign behind each
← Scroll to see all columns →
ClosedUnitPricePer sfDaysOf asking
2022-03-071602$11,913,000$3,114099%
2022-12-151403$12,025,000$3,3643790%
2023-01-311901$21,000,000$3,78819688%
2023-02-281702$11,165,675$2,92710386%
2023-08-30804$16,000,000$3,36336891%
2024-04-012302$27,988,425$3,03230270%
2024-05-30602$12,000,000$2,78611487%
2025-03-101401$14,900,000$3,41929085%
2025-06-131502$12,543,000$3,28812987%
2025-09-302203$15,175,000$3,04449966%
2025-12-151704$15,312,000$3,21830786%
2026-04-131801$19,420,500$3,50329683%

Source: BeachesMLS, closed residential sales, August 15, 2026

What Held

The floor. In our appreciation study we documented that no Bristol resale had cleared below $2,786 per square foot since 2022. A year later that line has not been touched. The one sale that sits exactly on it, unit 602 in May 2024, remains the cheapest way anyone has entered this building in four years, and even that trade required $2,786 a foot for a sixth-floor residence. The median across all twelve resales is $3,253.

A floor like this is not a sentiment. It is collateral. A buyer underwriting the Bristol knows the worst recorded outcome of the last four years to the dollar, which is precisely what most of the repricing luxury market cannot offer. Pricing in West Palm Beach at large has been noisy through the same period. The Bristol's floor has not been.

What Changed

Time, and the negotiation. The market will still pay record prices at the Bristol, but it will no longer pay them quickly or at ask. A resale that took a median of 103 days to close in 2022 and 2023 now takes 296. Since 2024 the median close has landed at 85 percent of the final asking price, down from 90 percent in the building's first resale years, and the two weakest outcomes cleared at 70 and 66 percent after long campaigns.

The discipline shows up in where the discount happens. Half of the twelve sellers never touched their published asking price, and the cuts that did come ran four to eleven percent. The deeper concessions were made privately, at the closing table. Sellers who price against the tape are still transacting. Sellers who price against hope are funding the days on market statistics.

The Year-by-Year Ledger

Put the twelve trades on a yearly axis and the report card writes itself. The 2022 pair closed in under three weeks each at a $3,239 median. In 2023 the building printed its record $3,788 while campaigns stretched to a 196-day median. The 2024 line looks like a stumble at $2,909, but its two trades were the record's two hardest negotiations, closing at 70 and 87 percent of ask. Then 2025 restored the median to $3,253 across four trades, and 2026's single print sits above all of them at $3,503. The line is not a straight climb. It is a floor test passed five years running.

The Bristol resale ledger by year
Trades, median close, median price per foot, and median days on market
← Scroll to see all columns →
YearTradesMedian closePer sfDays
20222$11,969,000$3,23918
20233$16,000,000$3,363196
20242$19,994,212$2,909208
20254$15,037,500$3,253298
20261$19,420,500$3,503296

Source: BeachesMLS, resale closings 2022 through August 15, 2026

The ledger, drawn
Median resale price per square foot by year at the Bristol

Source: BeachesMLS, resale closings since 2022

The Ask Ladder

Four residences are on offer, a combined $134.3M and the deepest sheet the 69-unit building has shown. The two lower asks sit inside the closed record and should find their market. The two upper asks are a different proposition. At $5,086 and $5,441 per square foot, they stand 34 and 44 percent above the $3,788 record, and the penthouse's $78,900,000 ask would rank among the largest condominium sales in Florida history. Whether the building's scarcity can carry a print that far above its own tape is the seventy-nine million dollar question, and our buyer's guide covers how to underwrite it.

The offering sheet
Every active listing at the Bristol, August 2026
← Scroll to see all columns →
AskingSizeAsk per sfOn market since
$78,900,00014,502 sf$5,4412025-12-23
$24,950,0004,906 sf$5,0862026-05-28
$15,500,0004,483 sf$3,4582026-02-20
$14,950,0004,483 sf$3,3352026-05-01

Source: BeachesMLS, active listings, August 15, 2026

The Buyer's Arithmetic

The tape gives a buyer everything needed to bracket a bid. The median resale here is 4,558 square feet. At the $2,786 floor that is $12.7M, and at the $3,253 resale median it is $14.8M. That is the band the building's own history defends. The two realistic listings on today's sheet ask $14,950,000 and $15,500,000, or 3 and 6 percent above the resale median per foot, which is an opening position rather than a provocation.

Since 2024 the median closing has landed at 85 percent of the final ask, so patient capital has been rewarded with real room. The one thing the record says a buyer cannot do is underwrite a break of the floor. No bid below $2,786 a foot has printed in four years, through rate shocks and repricing everywhere else in the county. The negotiation at the Bristol happens between the floor and the sheet, not below the floor.

Bottom Line

The Bristol enters late 2026 with its floor intact, its prints strong, and its patience tested. Buyers hold more negotiating room than the headline prices suggest, with time as their main leverage. Sellers hold a floor that four years of resale trading has never broken. And one penthouse holds the answer to whether this building sets the next benchmark for the corridor or simply confirms the current one.

For buyers weighing the ask ladder: Underwrite from the closed tape, not the sheet. The floor is $2,786 a foot, the resale median is $3,253, and since 2024 the median buyer has closed at 85 percent of the final ask. Price discipline here is not aggression. It is the building's own recorded history.

This report covers the twelve resale closings at the Bristol from January 2022 through August 15, 2026, plus the four active listings on that date. Developer-era closings (2018 through 2021) are excluded from resale statistics. Medians are used throughout in preference to averages because twelve trades are few enough for one outlier to distort a mean. Days on market and close-to-list ratios are as recorded in the MLS.

Price per square foot is computed on MLS-recorded living area.

All data sourced from BeachesMLS via the Spark API as of August 15, 2026, covering the complete listing record for 1100 South Flagler Drive, West Palm Beach, across all recorded subdivision spellings, deduplicated by listing id.

Nikko Karki
Written by

Nikko Karki

Nikko Karki holds an M.Sc. in economics from Helsinki School of Economics and has been in real estate for nearly two decades. He spent his early career on the developer side at Related Group in West Palm Beach, running the analysis behind the region's largest luxury projects. He has since worked on residential, commercial, and hospitality projects across the U.S., Europe, and Southeast Asia. He built this platform so that buyers and sellers could have better real estate outcomes through better analysis, for free.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Unit 1801 closed on April 13, 2026 for $19,420,500, or $3,503 per square foot. The sale took 296 days on market and closed at 83 percent of its asking price.
$2,786 per square foot. No resale has closed below that level since 2022, and the median across the twelve resales in that period is $3,253 per square foot.
Four, as of August 2026, asking from $14,950,000 to $78,900,000, a combined $134,300,000.
The median for 2024 through 2026 closings is 296 days on market, up from 103 days for 2022 and 2023.
The yearly medians read $3,239 in 2022, $3,363 in 2023, $2,909 in 2024, $3,253 in 2025, and $3,503 for 2026's single closing to date. The line is not a straight climb, but the floor beneath it has held for four years.
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