On Tuesday night, as returns came in and Zohran Mamdani secured his victory to become New York City’s next mayor, the reaction was swift in a place 1,300 miles south: Miami.
Not from New Yorkers looking to flee — at least not yet — but from Florida locals, who began moving to secure homes before the wave they fear is coming.
By Wednesday morning, waterfront homes that might normally linger through Thanksgiving were instead moving into contract at a fast clip.
“We are definitely seeing interest from New York City intensify because of the election,” Dina Goldentayer, a luxury broker with Douglas Elliman in Miami, told The Post. “The area codes 917 and 212 are popping up now almost as much as they did at the height of the COVID pandemic.”
But the phones lighting up didn’t cause the surge. The fear of them did.
“What I’m really seeing, what has happened the last few weeks, is that the local buyers have been so fearful that the New Yorkers are going to start coming in and buying everything up, that it’s been the local buyers that have put everything, all the homes, under contract,” she said. “They’re scared of wealthy New Yorkers coming up and taking up the good product.”
In the last 48 hours, properties that had been quietly available for weeks flipped to pending as locals raced to close deals earlier than planned.
“It’s usually like a two-week negotiation period, a two-week inspection period. But with the election that just took place, that’s what I believe has really fueled the market specifically this week,” she said. “The uptick started three to four weeks ago.”
The phenomenon isn’t isolated to Miami’s coastlines.
“When I speak to my counterparts in the other marketplaces like Boca Raton and Palm Beach, they are experiencing the same,” Goldentayer said.
In Orlando and Winter Park, the same psychological shift is underway — just with different price points.
“I’ve had a local buyer over the last couple days have that exact conversation of what will happen now that New York City has elected this new mayor. It is a concern,” Bryan Hyser, of the Agency’s Orlando office, told The Post. “They are asking if this is the right time to buy before things get crazy.”
What was once a rational delay — waiting out high interest rates — now looks like a gamble.
“Every buyer says the same thing: I want to sit and wait until interest rates get better. But if rates are going to take longer and we’re going to see a large influx of buyers coming from out of state, it’s probably smart to buy today,” Hyser said.
He described a Winter Park deal where the buyer referenced both Mamdani’s platform and future property tax changes as reasons to lock something in sooner.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty in New York and what the mayor is going to end up putting into policy,” he said. “People want to buy before the chaos.”
At the very high end of the market — waterfront estates in Miami Beach, oceanfront in Palm Beach and new luxury towers along the Intracoastal — wealthy New Yorkers are not panicking. They are planning.
