The Five Year Ledger
Highland Beach had a bigger 2021 frenzy than its neighbors and a bigger decline afterward: 374 sales closed in 2021, more than double any year since, and the pace has settled to roughly 138 sales a year. Dollar volume fell the same way, from $533 million in the frenzy year to $260 million in 2025. The 2026 row runs through early June and shows $181 million across 115 closings, almost exactly the post-frenzy pace.
Source: Beaches MLS closed sales, Highland Beach, deduplicated
Source: Beaches MLS closed sales through early June 2026
The Three-Mile Wall
Nearly all of the buying and selling happens in the condominiums: 989 closings since 2021, spread across buildings that date from the 1970s co-op era to the Toscana towers at the Boca line. Condominium prices rose by more than half in three years, from a median $414 per square foot in 2021 to $641 by 2024, and have since settled in the mid five hundreds as sales returned to a normal pace. The buildings behind that median sell at very different prices. Sales at three million dollars and above, led by the Toscana towers, close at about $1,138 per square foot, level with the least expensive towers in the Boca oceanfront corridor that our tower ranking measures a mile south. The rest of the buildings sell for far less. The discount usually means an older building and, increasingly, assessment risk, but this is still the cheapest direct oceanfront square footage between Delray Beach and the county line.
Source: Beaches MLS closed sales, condominiums only
The Five-House Aristocracy
The houses are a different market. Scattered between the towers sit a few dozen single family estates that have produced 65 sales in five years, at prices closer to Palm Beach than to Boca: the town's five largest sales are all houses, all on South Ocean Boulevard, and all between $28.5 and $40 million. The record, forty million dollars in April 2022, would have ranked among the county's largest sales that year outside Palm Beach itself. A median means little in a tier that closes six to nine sales in a typical year, but the pattern is consistent: direct ocean frontage, modern construction, and total privacy in a town most buyers overlook, at roughly 15 percent less per square foot than comparable estate sales in Manalapan a few miles north.
Source: Beaches MLS closed sales. Sales are matters of public record.
Reading a Two-Speed Market
Combined statistics mislead more in Highland Beach than almost anywhere else in the county, because the two products share little beyond a zip code: a $0.97 million median condominium on one side and, on the other, an estate tier where individual sales run into the tens of millions. Buyers should judge the condominiums building by building, weighing age and the risk of special assessments, and judge the estates one comparable sale at a time, the way our county outlook treats every thin luxury market. What the two tiers do share is scarcity: three miles of coastline with no downtown, no hotels, and no way to add supply, between two cities that keep getting more expensive.
Bottom Line
Highland Beach is two markets on one road. Condominium prices rose from $414 per square foot in 2021 to $641 at the 2024 peak, and the buildings still sell at about half the price of their Boca neighbors. The estate tier holds all five of the town's records, topped at forty million dollars. The combined numbers mean little, the supply cannot grow, and the town's low profile works in the patient buyer's favor.
For buyers considering Highland Beach: Shop the condominiums building by building, account for age and assessments, and treat the estates as their own market with their own comparable sales. The discount to the neighboring towns is real on both tiers, and the low profile is most of the reason.
Dataset: every closed sale recorded for Highland Beach in the MLS from January 2021 through June 2, 2026, 1,142 transactions after deduplication across feeds, split throughout between condominiums and single family houses per the listing record. The 2026 row is a partial year through early June. Per-square-foot figures use recorded living area. The estate tier sells only a handful of houses a year, so this report cites its individual sales rather than medians wherever possible.
Source: Beaches MLS closed-sale records via direct feed access. Individual sales referenced are matters of public record.
