Written by: Steve Thomas
Featured in VeroNews
Goodbye bright, blaring nightlife, traffic jams and the roar of Dolphins games. Hello, quiet dinners on Ocean Drive and peaceful walks along Vero’s uncrowded shore.
South Florida buyers are nothing new to the Vero Beach real estate scene. Ever since the pandemic, the stretch of coastline between Palm Beach and Miami has been an important feeder market for the island. Likewise Naples on Florida’s West Coast.
But island brokers and builders say they have seen a major surge in interest from South Florida luxury buyers attracted by Vero’s affordability and uniquely charming lifestyle.
“I haven’t seen anything like it in 16 years,” Douglas Elliman broker associate Michael Merrill says. “In the past 60 days, at least 30 percent of my showings have been with people from South Florida, and they are coming from everywhere down there, including Naples.”
“It is so striking,” says Sally Daley, also a broker associate in Douglas Elliman’s island office.
“They aren’t just coming from Palm Beach and Miami – it’s Fort Lauderdale, Boca, and other cities, too. Half of my showings so far this year have been with buyers from South Florida.”
No brokerage is better positioned to tap that wealthy South Florida flow than Premier Estate Properties. With six highly successful boutique luxury offices located in Palm Beach, Delray, Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale, the company has for years sent a steady stream of referrals to its Vero office, which is strategically located at the intersection of Beachland Boulevard and A1A, the island’s main thoroughfare.
Founded in 1993, the multibillion-dollar brokerage “has a proven history of effectively referring qualified buyers and sellers from its South Florida offices to its Vero Beach office,” says Joseph G. Liguori, Premier Estate Properties broker/owner.
“In the last six months alone, our Vero Beach office received three referrals who purchased or sold totaling over $20 million,” Liguori adds.
“One example involves a past client in Boca Raton whose residence I successfully sold, and whom I then personally referred to a trusted agent in Vero Beach to assist with their next purchase.
Through this coordinated, concierge-level approach, they ultimately acquired a spectacular riverfront estate for nearly $4 million in the second half of 2025.”
Merrill says South Florida buyers tend to look at homes in the $3-million-and-up range, zeroing in on neighborhoods up and down the island, from Central Beach to Windsor, with lots of interest in John’s Island properties and high-end oceanfront condos.
They are showing up on the mainland, too. GHO Homes president Bill Handler says a third of his buyers at The Reserve at Grand Harbor have been from South Florida.
The Reserve is the most upscale mainland subdivision and South Florida refuges are attracted by brand new homes in an established county club setting that cost far less than they would at a lower latitude.
“Buyers are attracted to Vero Beach for lower prices than South Florida, its natural beauty, low density and lifestyles,” according to Liguori, who says his South Florida referral business has remained steady since the pandemic.
Daley says buyers she sees from Lauderdale and Palm Beach are driven mainly by the desire for a less hectic lifestyle. “Congestion, congestion, congestion is what I am hearing,” she says.
“It can be a zoo down there,” says Handler. “If you don’t have to stay there for work, why wouldn’t you want to be in Vero Beach?”
Merrill, too, says his South Florida clients are trekking north in search of a less stressful, more relaxed way of living.
“The lifestyle they bought into years ago has shifted,” he told Realtor.com in a December article about the burst of interest in Vero Beach.
As an example, the population of Palm Beach County has nearly doubled since 1990, surging from 870,000 to more than 1.6 million, with lots of extra cars, fender benders, buildings and noise.
Go back a little further, and Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and even Miami were much more like Vero is now, with a slower pace and more breathing room.
At the same time, Vero has gotten livelier and more sophisticated, with more restaurants, shops and cultural venues. Accessibility, long a sticking point, has improved, too, dramatically, with multiple airlines now flying into Vero Beach Regional Airport from an expanding array of prime island feeder markets in the Northeast.
“There’s a lot more in Vero now than there was 20 years ago,” says Merrill.
At the same time, Merrill says the jaw-dropping price differential between Vero Beach and many South Florida markets also continues to drive buyers north.
He has a two-acre oceanfront parcel just south of Orchid Island Golf & Beach Club. That could be a small subdivision or a grand estate on the market for $13 million. He says a similar parcel “would be $100 million in Palm Beach.”
Handler is selling brand new 3,000-square-foot homes with modern design and luxe finishes in the $2 million range at The Reserve.
“That is a big number for mainland Vero, but these houses would be three times as much in Palm Beach, if you could find lots to build them on,” he says.
The current average per square foot price for a single-family home in 32963 is $676, according to Douglas Elliman statistics provided by Daley. That is about 20 percent of what buyers have to pay in the priciest Miami Beach ZIP code, where the average per square foot price tops $3,000.
Merrill says many of the south Florida buyers he sees are people who have sold second homes in Palm Beach and points south. In most cases, the homes have appreciated greatly in value since they were purchased.
In the past, those sellers probably would have stayed in the same area because their friends, favorite restaurants and clubs were there, but now they have a chance to bank serious money if they sell down there and move up here.
“If they stay in the same area and make a lateral move to a similar property, it will cost them just as much as they got for their property,” Merrill says. “If they want a banking component, they would have to downsize from a house to a condo. But they can move to Vero and get the same size house in a beautiful location for half as much or less.”
Daley likens the dynamic to a pinball machine. As people from up north buy houses in Palm Beach, Boca and Lauderdale, the sellers are looking at their balance sheet and bouncing up this way for the lifestyle and the financial benefit.
“It seems like everybody is leaving South Florida!” Daley told Vero Beach 32963 last week, while preparing for a showing with a Fort Lauderdale buyer.
