🏆 Residential: The top home sale recorded in South Florida came in at $58.3 million, as Michael Chu, co-founder and executive chairman of private equity firm L Catterton, and his wife Elizabeth Chu parted with a home at 102 Angler Avenue in Palm Beach. The buyer was a trust. The nearly 8,000-square-foot home has five bedrooms, seven full bathrooms and two half baths. The deal appears to have been off market.
🏆 Commercial: The top commercial transaction to hit records was GL Homes’ acquisition of 220 acres of land along 140th Avenue North in Westlake from Minto Communities, the master developer of Westlake, for $80 million. GL Homes plans to merge the newly acquired acres with a 120-acre site it bought in 2024, according to the South Florida Business Journal. The developer intends to build 1,000 homes on the combined site.
📊 Residential: Restaurateur Barton Weiss, also known as Barton G., sold his home at 1535 West 27th Street in Miami Beach to an LLC tied to David Moradi, an entrepreneur and investor, for $29.3 million. The deal for the more than 12,000-square-foot Sunset Islands mansion works out to about $2,400 per square foot. The Mediterranean-style home has nine bedrooms and nine and a half baths and sits along the canal. The property hit the market in March at $39.5 million. Jill and Danny Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group at Coldwell Banker had the listing, and One Sotheby’s International Realty’s Marko Gojanovic brought the buyer.
📊 Residential: Paul Wick, a financier, and his wife Karin Wick, an attorney, via a trust scooped up a newly built, four-bedroom penthouse at the Vita at Grove Isle at 5 Grove Isle Drive in Miami’s Coconut Grove. The price was about $20.1 million. The pad has 6,900 square feet of interior space and more than 5,100 square feet of exterior space. The luxury condominium was developed by Ugo Colombo’s CMC Group.
By the Numbers: U.S. existing home sales surge as borrowing costs drop
Thanks to falling borrowing costs and slowing home price growth, existing-home sales in the U.S. surged by 5.1 percent in December compared to the month before.
There were 4.35 million existing-home sales last month — the strongest month in almost three years, according to the National Association of Realtors, whose data has been seasonally adjusted.
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