Lavish Palm Beach Real Estate Boom Described in Tour Narrative

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images The Palm Beach finance crowd can paddleboard whenever they please. Behind a semicircular brick drive and a lawn as manicured as a putting green sits a 30,000-square-foot masterpiece of Italian Renaissance architecture called Casa Nana. John Porter, a real estate associate for Corcoran who oversees some of the largest sales in Palm Beach County, Florida, points out the spiral staircase, built by famed 1920s architect Addison Mizner for the founder of the National Tea Company. “This home went for $30.2 million in 2003; today that sum wouldn’t be in the top 25 highest prices” of houses for sale in this area, Porter says. “Palm Beach real estate has gone from nothing going on to nothing left to sell.” Porter is giving me a tour of the so-called Billionaire’s Row, a stretch of South Ocean Boulevard on the island of Palm Beach that is bordered by some of the highest hedges I’ve ever seen. Through gaps in the greenery appear stone fountains, elephant statues, pools the size of tennis complexes (next to actual tennis complexes), and more clay roofs than one could count. It’s amonumental display of wealth, and it is rapidly expanding, not just here but in Delray Beach, Jupiter, Palm Beach Gardens and Boca Raton, as HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_033158