Sloan’s Curve, the Bend in Palm Beach

The Year the Quiet Got Expensive

In July a townhouse on Sloans Curve Drive closed at $17,000,005, the highest price the enclave has recorded. Odd final digits like that usually mean a bidding contest came down to its last dollar. Whatever happened in the room, the result moved the ceiling for every address on the bend.

The drive had been warming up for years. One townhouse sold twice in five weeks in the spring of 2021, the second closing a million above the first. A neighbor took $7.5 million in early 2022, recorded only on the island's own board. Number one on the drive reached $14.9 million last January. The July record did not arrive from nowhere. It arrived on schedule.

Built in Two Years, Kept for Forty

The enclave went up almost all at once, four oceanfront buildings completed in 1980 and 1981, 192 residences between them, with the townhomes threaded along the drive behind. Nothing of scale has been added since, and the common areas took their renovation in 2018. What the eighties left behind is a shape the town would never permit again. Direct ocean frontage at the island's narrowest point, held by buildings short enough to keep the sky.

Position does the rest. The curve sits at the foot of the estate section, a neighborhood of single-family compounds where apartment living barely exists. A resident here holds a Palm Beach address with one set of keys and no staff quarters to run. That trade has a durable audience, and the buildings are old enough that the audience knows exactly what it is buying.

One Line of Apartments Tells the Decade

The clearest way to read the bend is to follow one floor plan through time. The 2100 building repeats a 2,385 square foot residence up its stacks, and that one line has recorded 9 sales since 2021. The chart below is all of them. In 2021 the line changed hands around $1.2M. Since 2024 its median is $3.6M, with one renovated residence reaching $4M. Floors, stacks and condition differ, and floor level always carries value on the ocean. The direction of the series does not depend on any of it.

The Market Lives Between Three and Five

Ten residences closed at the bend over the trailing twelve months. Eight landed between three and five million dollars, on a core band median of $3.9M at $1,450 a recorded foot. The other numbers describe a patient market. The median sale waited 197 days for its buyer and kept 93.4 percent of its last asking price. Half a season on the market is normal here, and it is not a symptom. Owners are rarely in a hurry, buyers wait for the right stack, and the price mostly holds while the two find each other.

What the band no longer includes is an entry door. In 2021 the smaller residences at the bend recorded closings in the high six figures. The last sale under a million dollars came in April 2023. That door did not close loudly. It simply stopped opening.

The Neighbors, Priced

The bend is the anchor of a short corridor of condominium addresses running south toward Manalapan, and the record prices them a building apart. The 2500 Building next door, a 1979 contemporary of similar bones, recorded its trailing year around $1,000 a foot, a third below the bend. Bellaria and 3550 South Ocean, the corridor's 2006 and 2019 vintages, trade too rarely to price reliably, and their scarcity is its own signal. The amenity sets explain part of the spread, and the table below puts them side by side.

Why the Record Takes Two Boards to Read

Palm Beach island trades on two multiple listing services, the regional MLS and the island's own board, and Sloan's Curve uses both. Some closings here only ever appear on the island board. The $7.5 million townhouse sale of 2022 is one of them. An agent who subscribes only to the regional feed, and that includes many West Palm Beach, Boca Raton and Miami agents, reads this record with pages missing. We hold both boards, our two-boards study measures the gap across the island, and every figure in this report draws on the union of the two.

What the Bend Offers Now

Five listings are open across the four buildings this week, on a median asking price of $4.4 million. The spread runs from an entry residence under three million to a renovated line above seven, which is the whole geography of the enclave in one week's inventory. The building page carries the live list and the closed record beneath it.