The Quarter
Closings slipped from 16 to fourteen while prices strengthened across the board. The median price per square foot reached $1,432, a level no full year in the village's record has touched, and the typical sale went from listing to contract in 49 days, down from 68 a year earlier. The one exception in the table makes the point. The quarter's largest sale, $14M in Old Port Village, was a rarity in this market, a large estate without dockage, and it waited 467 days for its buyer, roughly ten times the quarter's median. Buyers here pay for the water first and the house second.
Source: BeachesMLS, closed residential sales at $3M+, North Palm Beach, Q2 2026
Harbour Isles and the Pockets
Harbour Isles, a single gated peninsula, produced 5 of the quarter's 14 sales. Turnover like that is how small waterfront pockets tend to sell once prices reset: several owners reach the same conclusion in the same season, and a street that might record one or two sales in a typical year records five. The remaining sales spread across the village's established sections, from the lagoon estates to the country club addition. The pattern carries a practical lesson for buyers. Inventory in this village arrives in clusters rather than in a steady stream, so the season when a pocket starts selling is the season to look there.
The Shrinking Village Discount
North Palm Beach built its reputation as the affordable entry to the county's northern waterfront, the place a boater could buy dockage without paying island or corridor prices. That discount is narrowing. A median of $1,432 per square foot stands within reach of Jupiter's strongest waterfront numbers, and the quarter's three sales above ten million dollars exceed the village's full-year total from either 2023 or 2024. What buyers are repricing is the geography itself, protected water minutes from the inlet. The county pattern our 2026 outlook describes, money moving toward scarce waterfront access, runs directly through this village.
Five Years in the Village
The five-year table shows the 2021 surge of 58 sales settling toward a steadier pace near forty a year, while the median price per square foot climbed from $999 in 2021 to $1,432 in the current quarter. The gains have a physical driver. Teardowns and rebuilds along the canal streets keep replacing older houses with new construction, and the new houses set the price records. Like Gulf Stream and Tequesta, the village is small enough that its progress shows up in steps rather than a smooth line, and this quarter was a large step.
Source: BeachesMLS, closed residential sales at $3M+, North Palm Beach, full years
Source: BeachesMLS, closed residential sales at $3M+, North Palm Beach
Two Grades of Waterfront
The village's waterfront premium has a precise definition, and buyers should underwrite it precisely. North Palm Beach water comes in two grades: the open lagoon frontage of the estate sections, and the protected canal and harbour pockets, where value rests on three measurements. Those are the water depth at the dock, the clearance out to the channel, and whether a fixed bridge stands between the slip and the inlet. The quarter's waterfront sales clustered in the pockets with no bridge to open water, as the largest sales in the record usually do, because the owner of a seventy-foot boat will pay a real premium for a dock that boat can actually use. Diligence on the water itself, meaning depth surveys, seawall age, and lift capacity, matters as much as diligence on the house, and it usually explains the price gap between two canal homes that look identical from the street.
Bottom Line
North Palm Beach recorded $101.2M across fourteen sales in the second quarter, with a record median price per square foot, three sales above ten million dollars, and one estate without dockage that waited 467 days while the village's waterfront homes typically sold in a fraction of the time. The village that was once the affordable route to the northern waterfront is closing the gap on its more expensive neighbors.
For buyers watching the village: Follow the individual pockets rather than the village-wide numbers. Inventory here arrives in clusters, as this quarter's Harbour Isles sales showed, and the buyer who knows which pocket is about to come to market holds an advantage the county-wide portals cannot provide.
This report covers every residential closing at $3,000,000 or above recorded in North Palm Beach from April 1 through June 30, 2026 (14 sales), compared against the same quarter of 2025 (16 sales), with five-year context from January 2021. All figures run through June 30, 2026. Cross-listed duplicate records are removed by address, close date, and price. Medians are used throughout. Days on market measure list date to contract date. Community names are normalized from raw MLS subdivision records.
All data sourced from BeachesMLS via the Spark API.
