Wealthy Floridians Are Buying Up All of N.Y.C.’s Luxury Homes, a New Report Says

It was only a couple of years ago that a record number of high-earning New Yorkers fled the Big Apple . Oh, how the times have changed.

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In 2022, approximately 545,000 New York City residents packed their bags and moved to other parts of the country. A whopping 90,000 New Yorkers headed south to Florida, according to census data. As of last month, the state’s population had swelled to over 23 million, and each year has been adding anywhere from 350,000 to 375,000 new residents over the last decade.

However, a new report from real estate platform PropertyShark has revealed that well-to-do Floridians have begun to reverse course and are moving north again in increasing numbers. The study analyzed residential sales recorded in the first half of 2024 and found that Sunshine State residents are the leading buyers of luxury homes in New York City. So far, they’ve already splashed out a cool $150 million on homes across the city that are worth $3 million or more.

On a broader scale, Floridians spent a combined $315 million on New York City real estate and accounted for 219 sales between the months of January and June of this year. By contrast, in 2014, there were 189 transactions by Florida buyers.

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“The city’s luxury sector saw the number of out-of-state investors grow in the past 10 years, increasing from 13 percent of closed deals to nearly 17 percent,” the report said. “Among them, Floridians represented the most active cohort of out-of-state luxury buyers. More precisely, Floridians accounted for 17 percent of out-of-state deals above $3 million—higher than their share in the overall market, reaffirming Florida buyers’ preference for high-end properties.”

The mad dash back to the concrete jungle is partly due to rising costs , particularly skyrocketing home insurance premiums . “Insurance is a massive factor right now in the state of Florida, especially for some of those southern lower coastal areas,” Lindsey Johnson, a broker with Keller Williams in Gainesville, told Realtor.com . “The insurance rates are going up a lot.”

Indeed, Bloomberg reported last year that homeowner insurance rates in Florida have tripled since 2020, resulting in five-and even six-figure annual policies. As of April 2024, Floridian home owners were paying more than four times the national average for home insurance, causing some residents to drop their coverage and, in more and more cases, just leave the state entirely.

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