Florida Is Talking Up Big Wins From Mamdani Victory

By Giulia Carbonaro in Miami, Florida

Senior Housing Reporter

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For months before his victory at the November 4 election, Florida politicians and real estate agents were courting fearful and disgruntled wealthy New Yorkers who would find their lives getting a little bit harder under the leadership of Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.

Scott Singer, mayor of Boca Raton, went as far as placing a big, flashy ad on a digital billboard in Times Square earlier this year to convince New Yorkers to move out of the Big Apple and relocate to Palm Beach County. “Dear NYC, it’s not you, it’s me,” the ad reads.

Now that 34-year-old Mamdani is officially New York City’s mayor-elect, many in the Sunshine State are sure that a new wave of migration from the Northeast is about to happen.

“I know a lot of realtors who are getting a lot of calls from people from New York—something is happening. I cannot tell you what is the intensity, or how many people would be moving… but I guess, in a couple of months from now, we are going to see things happening,” Pascal Nicolai, CEO of Miami-based luxury home construction company Sabal Luxury Builder, told Newsweek during a phone interview.

A ‘New Home’ Waiting In Florida

Jaime Sturgis, CEO of Fort Lauderdale-based real estate company Native Realty, told Newsweek that clients “up in the Northeast” started calling him right after the polls started suggesting Mamdani might win the city’s mayoral election.

“Many of them at that point in time started planning essentially their departure from that state to relocate their assets down to South Florida,” he said. “Now I have several clients actively looking to close on properties before the end of the year,” he added.

Asked why so many New Yorkers are in a hurry to move down to Florida, Sturgis speaks of “the proverbial straw in the camel’s back.”

Many of his clients, he said, had been “kind of one foot out the door for quite some time”, with a few of them already selling a portion of their portfolio when they moved to Florida during the pandemic.

But, at the time, they were keeping some real estate holdings in New York City. Now, he said, “they want to move everything down and they want out. So they’re selling their portfolios in their entirety and they’re relocating down here.”

Most of South Florida—from Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties to Broward and Dave counties—is expected to win big from this expected exodus of New Yorkers out of the Big Apple.

In a Zoom interview with Newsweek, Singer said that he has had “thousands of people” respond to the ad, which was shown in New York City and other key markets such as Chicago and San Francisco, with people checking out the Boca Raton website promoted on the digital billboard.

“Immediately, we got a number of inquiries just within the first few weeks from ten different states,” Singer said. “We’ve seen businesses come already, and we’re continuing to have constructive dialogues with companies that have reached out since the election, as they want to come to a lower tax jurisdiction with a great talent base and high quality of life,” he added.

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For some of these people, buying a home in the Sunshine State almost comes at no cost. “You have to imagine, you can buy a house in Florida by sending money on taxes on a ten-year payout, and you have the house for free,” Nicolai said.

Obviously, moving to Florida is not for everyone. Singer’s ad, case in point, was not targeted to everyday New Yorkers, but business owners and leaders looking for corporate relocations, the Boca Raton mayor said.

“We are not planning, not able and not interested in welcoming every New York resident who wants to flee the city. We’re a fairly built-out city, and we’re not looking to accommodate them,” Singer said. “But we do have class-A office space that already exists or is under construction. That would be a great new home for some of these companies, and we have a great talent base here,” he added.

Feeding The South Florida Dream

Migration from the Northeast to Florida is nothing new for the Sunshine State. Businesses have been relocating from up north and the east coast long before the latest New York City mayoral election—and Singer hopes this movement will continue and even accelerate in the aftermath of Mamdani’s victory.

“We’ve seen substantial business growth, and we’ve been a haven for business since the 1960s, when IBM [International Business Machines] had its corporate headquarters here in Boca Raton. So we have that tradition of innovation and strong punching above our weight when it comes to business has continued to attract businesses,” Singer said.

Boca Raton has been targeting business people working in sectors ranging from technology, financial services, fintech and medtech to health care, biotech, AI and quantum computing. But the city is also still chasing the dream of Florida becoming the so-called Wall Street of the South.

“We have a great diversified group of financial services firms here, and with Wall Street particularly concerned about the impacts of the election, I think it’s ripe for them to consider a move to our class-A office space,” Singer said.

The Boca Raton mayor expects to see “a continued steady exodus” from New York City and other places in the coming months, as well as “a continued finding of new homes in Boca Raton for businesses.” On his part, he said the city will continue its outreach to New Yorkers.

Sturgis said the influx of New Yorkers he expects will bring “billions of dollars” to the state. “I have multiple clients that are moving nine-figure real estate portfolios down from New York to South Florida, who have called me and said, ‘I’m selling everything that I own in New York, and I need you to help me find assets to buy’,” he said.

“So I think that this second wave, if you will, is materially different from the first wave that we experienced during COVID. And again, people aren’t relocating their residences because they already live down here, but what they are relocating is their commercial real estate portfolios. They’re moving their investments down here, all of them, and they’re really cutting ties.”

Is The Hype Real?

For now, there are mainly rumors circulating around real estate agents and brokers about a growth in interest among wealthy New Yorkers to relocate to Florida—but not yet enough data to back them up..

“The main rumors are, ‘Oh, he’s a socialist, he has all these ideas about making public transport free, he’s going to set rent control and do all these things that are going to push capital out of New York’,” Juan Arias, national director of U.S. Industrial Analytics at the CoStar Group, told Newsweek in a company’s office in downtown Miami.

“I think that’s the story that is not new with Mamdani. Miami has been an inflow market for all of these states, including California, where people tend to come down here for a different quality of life and also to avoid certain taxes. That’s nothing new. And I think the rhetoric around Mamdani was trying to exploit that to a different degree.”

Whether or not that is going to turn out into a real-life influx of New Yorkers to Florida, Arias is “very doubtful” about, “just given the fact that there are a lot of limitations to what he can actually do. And there’s still a lot of hailwinds for the New York market,” he said.

Peggy Olin, CEO of luxury real estate company OneWorld Properties, agrees that taxation is likely the main concern of “sophisticated investors and buyers” in New York who are possibly fearful of what a Mamdani’s term “is going to mean for their businesses, their corporations, and their personal life.”

But Mamdani “doesn’t have the power to increase taxes,” Arias said. “There’s a few layers above him that actually control that. And in reality, the one sliver that he does control, which is the rent control piece of the equation—[...] that piece of the New York rental market has not been impacted historically. It’s not expected to see tremendous rent growth,” he said.

“We already had, historically, an issue with landlords [in New York City] trying to sell out of these apartments and get out because you have no return on those apartments. Typically, you want to see rent growth to justify continued investment in your residential stock. And without that, if you’re capping it, that does have a significant impact on the overall housing affordability,” Arias said.

“Typically, the brokerage community, the real estate community, try to sell that story. ‘Come down to Miami, we are very pro-business. We have much better tax incentives.’ And that has played out in the long term,” he added.

“But I think this was kind of like pushing it to another extreme, where I think the community down here got used to what happened during the pandemic, when a lot of New Yorkers did move down here, but then moved back after that. So trying to still play to that, like, ‘hey, come back. Keep on moving [down here],” Arias said.

Olin somewhat agrees, telling Newsweek that “nothing of this is new.” Instead, she said while sitting in an office in downtown Miami, Mamdani’s victory will likely be “just a catalyst, just an accelerator to what was already happening.”

Does Florida Need More New Yorkers?

In online conversations on Reddit and X, it is easy to find Floridians complaining about the ever-growing presence of New Yorkers and other out-of-staters who have moved to the state. That is because the past several years have seen a significant growth of these communities—especially in Miami and its surroundings.

“If we go back even before the pandemic, the demographics of Miami has been in a constant churn, where we see domestic outmigration of residents here, typically lower-income residents that historically get pushed out by higher-income residents that move in instead,” Arias said.

“We’re not really growing in population because the New Yorkers, the Californians that move in just push out local residents towards northern Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, Georgia, and so on—more affordable places to live in. That’s just a fact of life, that’s just how the system works,” he added.

“During the pandemic, with the lockdowns and the rise of remote work, this phenomenon accelerated, with “a lot more New Yorkers and Californians and people from Chicago coming in and pushing more locals out.” The cost of living has also increased dramatically, forcing people out of expensive cities like Miami.

But Arias said that there are also benefits to locals for every wealthy New Yorker who comes down to Florida.

“You don’t want your local community completely disassembled, but, at the same time, you want the community to continue to advance in regards to having better job opportunities, new companies moving into the area,” he said. “And for that to happen, you need to have corporate relocations. And so the brokerage community, the real estate community, really wants that to continue to happen.”

That only happens when “you have the executives, the high-level earners of those companies come down to Miami and check it out. They like it and then they decide, Okay, I’m going to move my HQ down to Miami and hire tons of workers making over $100,000 a year,” Arias said.

“And that brings up the income levels of the community and allows for all of this new development that you’re seeing, these new multi-family condos, luxury condos that get built.”

A higher supply of luxury homes can also help everyday buyers. Renters moving up to luxury condos vacate more affordable properties, which then become available to other buyers with smaller pockets and put downward pressure on prices in the entire market.

Wealthy residential property owners in the state are also clearly keen in seeing their equity potentially increase with more demand from out-of-state buyers. “I think that people are really excited that their home and their prices will continue to appreciate based on demand,” Olin said.

“We are extremely fortunate to be in South Florida in the sense that not only do we get the influx of the New Yorkers and other states, obviously, but also other parts of the world that are looking to South Florida as a place as a safe haven.”

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