Saddy Abaunza Delgado has sold luxury real estate in South Florida for over three decades, typically to doctors or family business owners ready to spend as much as $8 million on a home in the Miami area.
Almost overnight, that’s changed. Her phones are ringing with billionaires — titans of tech and finance — looking to drop nine figures on waterfront properties.
“I got a flurry of requests and inquiries,” Delgado, who has landed two billionaire clients recently, told Business Insider. “I had a lot of Zoom calls with people coming in January after the holidays.”
While the Florida migration among everyday people may have cooled following a pandemic-era boom, billionaires are fueling a spree of massive purchases. They are largely looking to avoid a proposed California wealth tax, which Delgado said led to the busiest January she’s ever experienced. She’s not the only one; three other agents told Business Insider that inquiries picked up at the end of 2025 and continued into 2026.
Google cofounder Larry Page dropped nine figures on properties in the 305 over the past few months, sparking a series of news articles about who might follow. His cofounder, Sergey Brin, is reportedly close to closing on a $50 million property, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly looking in the area.
“The Californians were never really a target market for us,” Delgado said. “California’s a beautiful state, but now, because of all the political situations and all the tax laws, it’s just coming in our favor.”
Florida’s billionaire population is growing. The state had 123 as of the start of the year, up from 110 in January 2025, according to Forbes data compiled by Americans for Tax Fairness.
California’s billionaires aren’t the only ones taking an interest. With Palantir planning to move its HQ from Denver to Miami, CEO Alex Karp may soon be putting down roots.
When Big Tech comes to call
People moving to Florida for tax reasons is nothing new. The state — which has a 0% income tax, including capital gains, and limited business regulation — has seen waves of ultrawealthy migration.
During the pandemic and shortly after, Miami boomed, attracting people from the northeast and Chicago who were drawn by lax COVID-19 restrictions and lower taxes.
Big names from the world of finance, like Citadel’s Ken Griffin and Thoma Bravo, moved themselves, and then their companies, to the city. Crypto firms flocked to take advantage of Florida’s friendly policies — FTX, pre-fall, made a grand entrance by buying the naming rights to the local arena — and many big-name VCs ensured they had at least one partner on the ground to make deals.
The proposed billionaire tax is helping propel the latest wave.
At the end of last year, some billionaires began cutting ties with California ahead of a proposed Billionaire Tax Act deadline, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth over $1 billion, including those who moved after January 1. The proposal hasn’t yet garnered enough support to make the November ballot, but that doesn’t mean rich residents haven’t threatened to leave the state.
Page spent over $180 million on three properties in Coconut Grove. Brin looks set to follow, with outlets including the New York Post reporting he’s in talks to buy a $50 million waterfront property on Allison Island. Zuckerberg, too, is looking to make a deal on billionaire bunker Indian Creek, as The Wall Street Journal reported.
Representatives for Page and Brin did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on Zuckerberg’s potential move to South Florida earlier in February.
Finance set the table, now it’s tech’s turn to eat — and their meals are the most expensive yet.
“Before, having a $20 million or $30 million sale was an outlier,” Ana Teresa Rodriguez of Coldwell Banker Realty told Business Insider. “You needed to be very lucky to sell that.”
Data from Miami real estate research firm Analytics Miami shows that in 2018, one single-family home over $30 million sold in Miami-Dade County. In 2025, 19 homes priced over $30 million sold — a 1,800% increase.
Empty lots are even selling for $100 million, a price point unheard of in Miami before 2020, according to Analytics Miami.
Water frontage has become the ultimate target for the ultrawealthy, and since there isn’t that much of it, it’s going for whatever someone is willing to pay.
“The prime single-family waterfront areas, like Star Island, Indian Creek, and the Venetian Islands, all those places, that’s prime scarcity,” Analytics Miami founder Ana Bozovic told Business Insider. “The influx of billionaires from California,” she said, will likely add to the “escalation of the market.”
More than mansions
Billionaires are famously high-maintenance, and attracting them is no small feat.
Douglas Elliman agent Dina Goldentayer said that the latest crop of Miami movers — coming from an already sunny state — aren’t just fascinated by the sun rays and glamour of South Florida.
“Miami has never been as sophisticated and as diverse as it is in 2026, and the level of wealth moving here is making Miami level up,” Goldentayer told Business Insider.
Though the number of billionaires arriving in Miami enclaves is small relative to those neighborhoods’ total populations, their wealth is not. A dozen billionaires can have an outsize influence on a local economy.
“Wealthy people like to have access to really good financial advice; they want to have access to good legal advice,” Liam Bailey, the global head of research at Knight Frank, told Business Insider.
To attract that infrastructure, Billionaire Florida transplants Griffin and Stephen Ross put a combined $10 million toward a new effort to bring talent and companies to Florida’s “Gold Coast,” the stretch from Miami to Palm Beach.
Their push, called “Ambition Accelerated,” aims to attract tech and business sectors by working with founders, CEOs, and investors, CEO Mike Simas of the Florida Council of 100, which is running the initiative, told Business Insider. He pointed to the region’s expanding educational and healthcare options, such as new private schools and a Cleveland Clinic branch in West Palm Beach, as key selling points.
And of course, money — from tax savings to utility costs — is a big part of the pitch.
“You’ve got a partner in government for your growth rather than a government that’s trying to cap that success with regulation or tax, or other burdens,” Simas said.
To be sure, Miami has been trying to make Miami happen for quite some time — and it’s a long way from becoming the next Wall Street or Silicon Valley.
“Even if compared to the size of the financial cluster in New York, it’s tiny, and the tech cluster in California, it’s tiny. What’s going on at the moment, in Miami, is embryonic,” Bailey said. “Over time, if you get enough of this kind of activity, you are basically constantly enhancing the depth of talent pool and the depth of opportunities.”
After all, a tanned and McMansion-filled Rome wasn’t built in a day.
