West Palm Beach Market Report: Q2 2026

The Quarter

Every measure improved. Closings rose to 36, the per-foot median climbed 13 percent, and the median time to contract held inside three months at 88 days. The bigger change was the mix: the tower tier more than doubled its share of the quarter's sales, and the largest closing came from the corridor rather than the estate sections for the first time in the recent record. The city's luxury market was built on its lakefront estates, and its growth now comes from its towers.

The Corridor's Quarter

The Bristol's $19.4M sale topping the city extends a pattern this publication has documented all season across the corridor's buildings: the Bristol's price floor holding through every test, the Plaza's position at the corridor's entry, and now a quarter in which the corridor outsold the estates outright. Behind the headline, 1515 Flagler's $8M sale and the tower tier's $1,983 median per foot show the premium spreading across buildings rather than concentrating in one, which is what a corridor maturing into an institutional market looks like.

The construction pipeline reinforces the scarcity argument. The corridor's buildable waterfront sites are nearly exhausted, the next deliveries are already priced above the buildings standing today, and every completed building converts a construction site into a comparable. A tier whose supply is ending while its demand keeps growing tends to reprice upward between deliveries. The island of Palm Beach followed the same path after its own construction ended.

Towers and Estates

The estate half of the city still produced most of the sales and most of the dollars, 27 house closings led by an $18.2M waterfront sale and the lake-block streets of the historic districts, at a median $1,233 per foot. The per-foot gap is the clearest structural fact: the towers' $1,983 runs well above the houses, the inverse of most of the county, because corridor buildings compete with the island across the water while the city's houses compete with the mainland. The two tiers are effectively separate markets, the overall median will keep swinging with whichever tier finds inventory, and this report keeps them separate for that reason.

Five Years of West Palm

The five-year record shows steady growth with a change of driver. Closings climbed from 60 in 2021 to 88 in 2025, the per-foot median rose from $1,099 toward the current quarter's $1,343, and the source of the growth shifted along the way: the early years were estate repricing, the recent ones are tower deliveries and corridor scarcity. With the financial district still drawing wealth to the city and the corridor's buildable sites nearly gone, the luxury market here is becoming a scarcity market, as the island's did before it, one delivery cycle at a time.