For months before his victory at the November 4 election, Florida politicians and real estate agents were courting fearful and disgruntled wealthy New Yorkers who would find their lives getting a little bit harder under the leadership of Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Scott Singer, mayor of Boca Raton, went as far as placing a big, flashy ad on a digital billboard in Times Square earlier this year to convince New Yorkers to move out of the Big Apple and relocate to Palm Beach County. “Dear NYC, it’s not you, it’s me,” the ad reads.
Now that 34-year-old Mamdani is officially New York City’s mayor-elect, many in the Sunshine State are sure that a new wave of migration from the Northeast is about to happen.
“I know a lot of realtors who are getting a lot of calls from people from New York—something is happening. I cannot tell you what is the intensity, or how many people would be moving… but I guess, in a couple of months from now, we are going to see things happening,” Pascal Nicolai, CEO of Miami-based luxury home construction company Sabal Luxury Builder, told Newsweekduring a phone interview.
Is The Hype Real?
For now, there are mainly rumors circulating around real estate agents and brokers about a growth in interest among wealthy New Yorkers to relocate to Florida—but not yet enough data to back them up..
Peggy Olin, CEO of luxury real estate company OneWorld Properties, agrees that taxation is likely the main concern of “sophisticated investors and buyers” in New York who are possibly fearful of what a Mamdani’s term “is going to mean for their businesses, their corporations, and their personal life.”
But Mamdani “doesn’t have the power to increase taxes,” Arias said. “There’s a few layers above him that actually control that. And in reality, the one sliver that he does control, which is the rent control piece of the equation—[...] that piece of the New York rental market has not been impacted historically. It’s not expected to see tremendous rent growth,” he said.
“We already had, historically, an issue with landlords [in New York City] trying to sell out of these apartments and get out because you have no return on those apartments. Typically, you want to see rent growth to justify continued investment in your residential stock. And without that, if you’re capping it, that does have a significant impact on the overall housing affordability,” Arias said.
“Typically, the brokerage community, the real estate community, try to sell that story. ‘Come down to Miami, we are very pro-business. We have much better tax incentives.’ And that has played out in the long term,” he added.
A higher supply of luxury homes can also help everyday buyers. Renters moving up to luxury condos vacate more affordable properties, which then become available to other buyers with smaller pockets and put downward pressure on prices in the entire market.
Wealthy residential property owners in the state are also clearly keen in seeing their equity potentially increase with more demand from out-of-state buyers. “I think that people are really excited that their home and their prices will continue to appreciate based on demand,” Olin said.
