The top 10 residential deals were all above $100 million—up from seven in 2024 and five in 2023, according to data compiled by appraiser Jonathan Miller and The Wall Street Journal. This milestone also topped the eight $100 million-plus deals in 2021, at the height of Covid’s real-estate frenzy.
Deals of this magnitude are no longer a fluke, said Miller, who said since the pandemic there have been an average of 40 sales a year for $50 million or more. “The separation between the haves and have-nots is expanding, and it is being reflected in real estate,” Miller said.
Affluent buyers are scooping up luxury real estate as a way to diversify their portfolios, store wealth or as a hedge against inflation. “People feel the stock market is trading high, so they are investing in hard assets,” said Ryan Serhant, of real-estate brokerage Serhant. “Luxury real-estate is recession resistant.”
Most of the major deals were in tax havens such as Florida. There were 19 sales above $50 million in Florida in 2025, compared with 12 in New York and 10 in California, Miller said. Miami had four sales above $100 million; before 2025, the city had just two nine-digit sales in its history. This year several plots of vacant land in Miami and Palm Beach even commanded those amounts.
None of the top 10 deals were in Manhattan, which still had a banner year with contracts at or above $4 million up 11% year-over-year, according to Olshan Realty. The lone New York deal was in the Hamptons, which staged something of a comeback and had a $115 million sale. Los Angeles continued to battle the effects of a mansion tax enacted in 2023 and fallout from the January 2025 wildfires. There are also concerns about a proposed wealth tax on billionaires. The year’s biggest trades involved local buyers looking to upgrade, said Drew Fenton of Carolwood Estates.
Throughout the U.S., agents said domestic buyers are dominating the luxury market. In Palm Beach and Miami, deep-pocketed buyers are chasing the same properties, resulting in off-market deals being struck for astronomical sums. “It isn’t as much comp driven as it is, ‘This is what we’re willing to pay,’” said Miami agent Danny Hertzberg of the Jills Zeder Group at Coldwell Banker Realty.
Savvy buyers are also cobbling together large assemblages, including Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi, who amassed a roughly $250 million compound in Palm Beach, and investor David Hoffmann, who paid $105 million combined for adjacent waterfront properties in Naples.
Such assemblages have investment value since they can be broken up, sold in chunks or rented down the line. But they are also wildly personal for those with the means. “It’s all about control,” said Serhant. “Why let someone move in next door if you can move in next door yourself?”
Here’s a closer look at this year’s 10 biggest deals.
In April, a mystery buyer paid $225 million for a waterfront estate in Naples, a hotbed of uber-luxury home sales. The seller is tied to the DeGroote family of Canada, which began assembling the 15-acre compound in the 1990s, property records show. Listed in 2024, the estate has multiple residences. At the time of the purchase, it was the second-highest home sale in the U.S., following Ken Griffin’s $238 million purchase at New York’s 220 Central Park South.
In Palm Beach, Charles Simonyi pieced together a roughly 3-acre assemblage of prime waterfront on North Ocean Boulevard. First, he bought two oceanfront lots with 360 feet of direct frontage from billionaire cosmetics heir William Lauder, paying close to the last asking price of $177.8 million. A few months after closing that deal, the Microsoft billionaire scooped up neighboring properties across the street. He paid $18 million for a Mediterranean-style house previously owned by media executive Cathleen Black and her husband, retired attorney Thomas Harvey, and $30 million for a roughly 5,800-square-foot house next door, which was owned by North Ocean Boulevard Land Trust. All told, he spent roughly $250 million.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp set an Aspen-area record when he bought a roughly 3,700-acre ranch that housed an order of Trappist monks for nearly 70 years. About 30 minutes from Aspen, St. Benedict’s Monastery has a roughly 24,000-square-foot main monastery building, plus multiple small cabins.
Karp in a statement to the Journal said he plans to work with the previous users of the property to continue to care for the land. The deal tops the $108 million sale of an estate at the base of Red Mountain in 2024.
In February, healthcare-technology entrepreneur Michael Ferro bought the longtime Miami Beach home of Russian-born hospitality magnate Vladislav Doronin. On exclusive Star Island, the 2.45-acre property has a roughly 18,700-square-foot mansion. Doronin purchased the estate from basketball star Shaquille O’Neal for $16 million in 2009.
Energy billionaire Len Blavatnik was behind New York’s only nine-figure sale in 2025 when he bought the waterfront estate owned by Terry Semel. The former Yahoo CEO purchased the 8.5-acre estate for $43 million from Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman, records show. The property has a main house, a guesthouse and a tennis court.
In May, Australian billionaire James Packer purchased Le Belvedere, a château-style home on 2.2 acres in Bel-Air. Measuring more than 35,000 square feet, it at one point the megamansion had 10 bedrooms, a ballroom with seating for more than 200 and a Turkish hammam. The lavish mansion was once owned by real-estate developer Mohamed Hadid, the father of models Gigi and Bella Hadid, who sold the property for $50 million in 2010.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt, expanded their extensive real-estate portfolio with their purchase of a storied Los Angeles mansion known as the Manor. Built around 1990 for television producer Aaron Spelling, the French chateau-style property is slightly larger than the White House and has a bowling alley, wine cellar and a beauty salon. It last sold for around $120 million in 2019, after a massive renovation. The Schmidts snagged the mansion after the seller managed to clear the title to the property after the Manor was targeted by scammers who executed a phony deed on the house.
Jeff Bezos owns three properties on Indian Creek. So when a 1.8-acre waterfront parcel adjacent to two of his properties hit the market for $200 million in 2024, locals suspected he would pounce. Instead, an unidentified international finance executive bought the site through a trust. Entrepreneur Mikhail Peleg paid $27.5 million for the land in 2018 and tapped luxury home builder Manny Angelo Varas to build a roughly 25,000-square-foot mansion. The house was not built; the new owner’s plans for the site aren’t known.
On a coveted waterfront stretch of Miami Beach’s North Bay Road, developer Todd Michael Glaser and his partners spent big on a 2.34-acre waterfront estate, where they are building a new mansion. Fellow developer Sonny Kahn bought the property for $2.4 million in the early 1990s. After razing an existing roughly 19,200-square-foot mansion, Glaser and his partners plan to build a 40,000-square-foot mansion. The asking price will be between $250 million and $300 million; as of late December, the land, which is about 500 feet deep with roughly 290 feet of frontage on Biscayne Bay, was also available for $169 million.
The longtime Miami home of restaurateur Jonathan Lewis changed hands right before the New Year. In Coconut Grove, the compound was listed a year after Lewis died. The late philanthropist pieced together at least 10 parcels over the course of several decades to create a 4.5-acre estate with frontage on Biscayne Bay.
There are two principal residences: one built in the 1920s for Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, and another built around 2002 for Jonathan’s father, Peter Lewis, a one-time CEO of Progressive Insurance Company.
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