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California billionaires seeking favorable tax policy are making Miami hotter than ever.
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Larry Page spent nine figures on three properties, and Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin are reportedly looking.
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Luxury agents say that at the upper end of the market, prices are going in one direction: up.
Saddy Abaunza Delgado has been selling luxury real estate in South Florida for more than three decades, usually to doctors or family business owners willing to spend up to $8 million for a home in the Miami area.
Almost overnight, that changed. His phones are ringing with billionaires – titans of technology and finance – looking to lose nine figures on waterfront properties.
“I’ve gotten a ton of requests and inquiries,” Delgado, who recently landed two billionaire clients, told Business Insider. “I had a lot of Zoom calls with people who were coming in January after the holidays.”
While the migration of ordinary people to Florida may have calmed after the pandemic boom, billionaires are fueling a massive buying frenzy. They are largely seeking to avoid a proposed wealth tax in California, which Delgado said led to the busiest January she has ever experienced. She is not the only one; three other agents told Business Insider that inquiries resumed in late 2025 and continued through 2026.
Google co-founder Larry Page has dropped nine figures on 305 properties in recent months, sparking a series of news articles about who might follow. Its co-founder, Sergey Brin, is reportedly close to closing on a $50 million property, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly scouting the area.
“Californians have never really been a target market for us,” Delgado said. “California is a beautiful state, but now because of all the political situations and all the tax laws, it’s working in our favor.”
Florida’s billionaire population is growing. The state had 123 at the start of the year, up from 110 in January 2025, according to Forbes data compiled by Americans for Tax Fairness.
Californian billionaires are not the only ones interested in it. As Palantir plans to move its headquarters from Denver to Miami, CEO Alex Karp may soon be putting down roots.
People moving to Florida for tax reasons is nothing new. The state – which has zero income tax, including capital gains, and limited business regulation – has seen waves of migration of the ultra-rich.
During the pandemic and shortly after, Miami boomed, attracting people from the Northeast and Chicago attracted by lax COVID-19 restrictions and lower taxes.
Big names in the financial world, like Ken Griffin and Thoma Bravo of Citadel, set up themselves and then their businesses in the city. Crypto companies have flocked to take advantage of Florida’s favorable policies — FTX, before the fall, made a splash by purchasing naming rights to the local arena — and many big-name venture capital firms have made sure to have at least one partner on the ground to make deals.
The proposed tax on billionaires is helping to propel the latest wave.
Late last year, some billionaires began cutting ties with California ahead of the proposed deadline for the Billionaire Tax Act, which would impose a one-time 5% tax on California residents worth more than $1 billion, including those who moved after Jan. 1. The proposal has yet to garner enough support to be voted on in November, but that doesn’t mean wealthy residents haven’t threatened to leave the state.
Page spent more than $180 million on three properties in Coconut Grove. Brin appears set to follow, with outlets like the New York Post reporting that he is in talks to buy a $50 million waterfront property on Allison Island. Zuckerberg is also looking to strike a deal on the billionaire Indian Creek bunker, as reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Representatives for Page and Brin did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on Zuckerberg’s potential move to South Florida earlier in February.
Finance has set the table, now it’s technology’s turn to eat – and their meals are the most expensive yet.
“Before, doing a $20 million or $30 million sale was an outlier,” Ana Teresa Rodriguez of Coldwell Banker Realty told Business Insider. “You had to be very lucky to sell that.”
Data from Miami real estate research company Analytics Miami shows that in 2018, a single-family home for more than $30 million sold in Miami-Dade County. In 2025, 19 homes priced above $30 million were sold, an increase of 1,800%.
Empty lots are even selling for $100 million, an unprecedented price in Miami before 2020, according to Analytics Miami.
Water frontage has become the ultimate target for the ultra-rich, and since there aren’t many of them, they’re used for whatever someone is willing to pay.
“The major single-family waterfront areas, like Star Island, Indian Creek and the Venetian Islands, all those places, are a major shortage,” Ana Bozovic, founder of Analytics Miami, told Business Insider. “The influx of billionaires from California,” she said, will likely contribute to “the escalation of the market.”
Billionaires are high-maintenance, and attracting them is no easy feat.
Douglas Elliman agent Dina Goldentayer said Miami’s latest generation of movers — coming from an already sunny state — aren’t just fascinated by the sunshine and glamor of South Florida.
“Miami has never been more sophisticated and diverse than it is in 2026, and the level of wealth moving there is raising the bar for Miami,” Goldentayer told Business Insider.
Although the number of billionaires arriving in Miami’s enclaves is small relative to the total population of these neighborhoods, their wealth is not. A dozen billionaires can have outsized 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, global head of research at Knight Frank, told Business Insider.
To attract that infrastructure, the Florida billionaire is transplanting Griffin and Stephen Ross by investing a combined $10 million in a new effort to attract talent and businesses to Florida’s “Gold Coast,” which stretches from Miami to Palm Beach.
Their initiative, called “Ambition Accelerated,” aims to attract the tech and business sectors by working with founders, CEOs and investors, CEO Mike Simas of the Florida Council of 100, which is leading the initiative, told Business Insider. He pointed to the area’s expanding educational and health care 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 talk.
“You have a government partner in your growth rather than a government that tries to limit that success through regulations, taxes or other burdens,” Simas said.
Certainly, Miami has been trying to make Miami a reality for some time – and it’s far from becoming the next Wall Street or Silicon Valley.
“Even though compared to the size of the financial hub of New York, it’s tiny, and the tech hub of California, it’s tiny. What’s happening right now, in Miami, is embryonic,” Bailey said. “Over time, if you do enough of these types of activities, you constantly improve the depth of the talent pool and the depth of opportunity.”
After all, a bronzed, McMansion-filled Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Read the original article on Business Insider
