Market intelligence, insider strategies, and stories from the heart of Fort Lauderdale luxury real estate.
Harbor Beach residents share a 300-foot private beach held by a club founded in 1942, and membership belongs to the neighborhood, not to the open market.
Most of my buyers start out wanting a dock. Then they price a real one east of Federal, look at the bridge and clearance problems, and start asking a smarter question: what do I actually use the water for? For a lot of them the honest answer is almost never. That is the moment Victoria Park makes sense. It is one of the few close-in Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods where you can walk to Las Olas, live across from a 90-plus-acre park, and still get a new build, without paying the premium that direct ocean access carries.
Sunrise Key is a 34-acre island in the Middle River holding just 72 single-family homes, with one road in and one road out. It was the last of the Las Olas district isles to be developed, platted in the late 1950s with 82 lots, and it is one of the few Fort Lauderdale waterfront enclaves that funds its own security through a state-recognized neighborhood improvement district. Its FY 2026 district budget is $223,168, paid by the island's own property owners at a 1.0 mill levy. That structure, not the marketing, is what makes this island different.
Las Olas Isles is a collection of man-made finger islands just off Las Olas Boulevard, dredged and developed starting in the 1920s. The community spans six distinct enclaves, Seven Isles, Nurmi Isles, Riviera Isles, Coral Isles, Venice Isles, and Idlewyld, and remains one of Fort Lauderdale's most prestigious waterfront addresses, prized for deep-water canals with no fixed bridges to the ocean.
Harbor Beach is a guard-gated, roughly 400-home enclave in southeast Fort Lauderdale, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean, the Intracoastal Waterway, and Port Everglades. Developed starting in 1940 around a private beach club, it remains one of the city's most prestigious waterfront communities, with homes typically ranging from the mid-single digits into the tens of millions.
A guide to Rio Vista, one of Fort Lauderdale's oldest and most sought-after waterfront neighborhoods, from its 1920s roots to what buyers and sellers should know about the market today.
Coral Ridge gets sold as one address, and it is not one address. East of Bayview Drive you get Intracoastal-side canals with direct ocean access and no fixed bridges. West of Bayview you get the Middle River, which sits behind the fixed bridge at Sunrise Boulevard, so a lot of boats simply cannot leave. Then there is the dry-lot inventory, which trades on schools and streets rather than water. Same neighborhood name, three completely different products, and the price you should pay is different for each one.
This weekend brings the 41st Annual International Coastal Cleanup on Broward's beaches Saturday morning, Elsten Torres recording a live album at the Amaturo Theater downtown, and the Viva Fort Lauderdale exhibit open all three days at the New River Inn on the Riverwalk.
This weekend brings a Mexican Independence Day celebration at The Wharf on Las Olas, the closing stretch of Dine Out Lauderdale across the whole county, and The Strokes at Hard Rock Live on Sunday night. Here is what is worth Friday through Sunday, and where each one sits.
In 2008, I lost my job. I had no real estate plan, no luxury client list, and no shortcut into the business. I started with short sales, courthouse cold calls, and the work most people avoid. Years later, I lead a Fort Lauderdale real estate team built around systems, clear expectations, and an insistence that the client experience has to be as strong as the marketing. This is not a story about one lucky break. It is about what kept working, even when the market and the business changed.
After 17 years selling luxury real estate in Fort Lauderdale, I am building my first spec home here, and I am filming every step of it. Not the finished-product version. The land decision, the design arguments, the budget, the parts I get wrong. Most people only ever see a new build on the day it hits the market, fully staged, with a price attached. This series starts about two years before that moment.
Fort Lauderdale's dining scene is expanding fast this summer, with several buzzed-about restaurants from Miami opening their first Broward County locations. New arrivals include Skinny Louie (Las Olas), Hula Kai Tiki Bar (17th Street Causeway), Little Hen (Las Olas), and Peppi's Pizza (Sunrise Blvd).
This weekend in Fort Lauderdale (August 1-2, 2026) brings a Caribbean history exhibit downtown, a four-year anniversary luau at Patio Bar & Pizza, a Sunday jazz brunch on the Riverwalk, and the Starlight Concert Series continuing in Victoria Park's Holiday Park.
This weekend in Fort Lauderdale brings an art fest in FAT Village, a vintage flea market in Tarpon River, live music at Revolution Live, and the Starlight Concert Series in Victoria Park.
Inside 2010 Intracoastal Drive: a rare no-fixed-bridge Coral Ridge waterfront estate by Glenn Wright, offered at $9,799,000. Six beds, six-and-a-half baths, 87 feet of Intracoastal frontage.
Sellers think the listing appointment is the work. It is not. By the time I sit down at your kitchen table on a Coral Ridge or Rio Vista street, the part that actually protects your equity has already happened, and you were not in the room for it. I have been doing this in Fort Lauderdale for 17 years and have prepared more than 600 valuations, and the pattern never changes: the widest gap in this market is not between neighborhoods or price bands, it is between listings that were prepared and listings that were simply posted.
I toured a $10M new-construction home on the Intracoastal in Coral Ridge recently, and I brought my four-year-old grandson along, which tells you how relaxed the day was. The house itself is a serious problem for anyone selling a resale home at a similar number. It comes with 85 feet of Intracoastal frontage, room for a boat lift sized for 37 to 47 foot boats, concrete and steel construction, a metal roof, and a two-year builder warranty, which is double the industry standard. If your home competes with that, the warranty alone is doing work your listing cannot.
Selling your own home is legal in Florida, and for the right homeowner it can work. What sinks most for-sale-by-owner attempts is not the missing sign in the yard, it is the six things that get skipped: pricing off an online estimate, thin disclosures, no real market exposure, weak presentation, unscreened buyers, and no attorney on the contract. If you are going to do this yourself, do it the way a listing agent would.
Open houses are treated as a default step in selling a home, and they should not be. Whether one helps you depends on six things: your price point, your privacy, visibility, how the home shows, current market conditions, and timing in your first week. At the luxury end, a broker's open and private appointment-only showings usually do more than an open Sunday, and I would rather run the campaign than fill the driveway.
Starting November 2, 2026, a nationwide appraisal system change called UAD 3.6 replaces the subjective, narrative-driven appraisal process with a fully standardized, data-driven one. For homeowners planning to sell, this shift means undocumented upgrades may no longer count toward value, and preparation needs to start now.
There are three legitimate ways to price a luxury home: at market, below market, and above market. Each carries a different level of risk and leads to a different outcome. Below, Lourdes Maestres breaks down what actually happens with each strategy, based on 17 years selling luxury real estate in Fort Lauderdale and over 505 market analyses completed in this city.
Rising hurricane-season insurance premiums are now affecting how luxury homes sell in Fort Lauderdale. Buyers and their lenders are checking insurance costs earlier in the process, sometimes before an offer is even submitted, and homes without current wind mitigation reports or updated roof documentation can lose buyers to sticker shock.
Fort Lauderdale insurance averages $17K a year and can scare off buyers. Here's how a $150 wind mitigation report and 2026 rate cuts help sellers.
One seller spent $45K before listing, only $12K showed up in the sale price. Here's why to talk to your agent before spending a dollar prepping your home.
Seller anxiety comes from silence, not the market. See how the MPH Team's weekly Tuesday report keeps homeowners informed on marketing, feedback, and data.
A three-level townhome just came on the market in Victoria Park at $1,590,000: 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 2,961 square feet, built in 2006, with an elevator, impact glass throughout, a private pool, and no HOA. At that price a lot of buyers are still comparing it to a small waterfront house east of Federal. That is the wrong comparison. The right one is a line-item comparison of what you own, what you maintain, and what you actually use.
I bought a lot in Riverside Park for $465,000. It was listed at $525,000. That $60,000 gap is not luck, it is the whole point: in land, the deal is made the day you buy, not the day you sell. Before the first permit was pulled I had already spent another $4,000 on tree work, just under $10,000 on demolition, and $10,500 on fencing to secure the site. Nobody puts those line items in the pretty renderings, so here they are.
A friend called me with a $1.5M budget and a short list: new construction, no HOA, good schools, and a primary bathroom that felt like a retreat. What she bought in Harbordale, one street off Rio Vista, has a spa bathroom that would not look out of place in a $3M house. But the finishes are not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the house is not in a flood zone, which saves roughly $3,000 a year against comparable homes right next door, and the new-construction insurance runs about $2,000 a year. Those two lines change what you can actually afford far more than the tile does.
Flood zone versus non-flood zone might be the single most misunderstood factor in Fort Lauderdale real estate. Most people assume it is a simple question of whether a home sits on the water. It is not. The FEMA designation on a property affects your insurance, your financing, how the home was built, and in some cases what you are legally allowed to do to it later. In 17 years selling here, it is one of the very first things I pull for every homeowner I work with, before we ever talk about the house itself.
Every few weeks a buyer tells me they cannot find the house they want in Fort Lauderdale, and asks whether they should just build it. Both paths work. They fail for different reasons. Buying built gives you speed and cost certainty; building gives you the lot, the layout, and current code, at the price of time, contingency budget, and decision fatigue. The part that decides it for most people is not taste, it is financing, and it almost never comes up early enough.
"Live for free" is one of the most oversold phrases in real estate, and occasionally it is literally true. On a renovated four-unit building we recently toured near the beach in Pompano, the idea is simple: you live in one unit and the other three carry the mortgage. Whether that actually works depends on the financing structure you choose, and the three options produce very different answers.
In 17 years selling here, I have completed more than 600 market analyses on Fort Lauderdale homes. The pattern is consistent: the buyers who end up happy five years later are not the ones who moved fastest. They are the ones who asked harder questions before they wrote the offer.
Fort Lauderdale homes are now averaging 99 days on market, up from 86 days a year ago, even as sales volume rose to 3,774 homes in July 2026. That combination, more time on market alongside more homes selling, is the clearest sign yet that buyers have real negotiating leverage right now, if they know how to use it.
Fort Lauderdale's $134K list-to-sale gap and 100 days on market give buyers real leverage in 2026. Here's how to use it to negotiate a better deal.
Hurricane season makes some Fort Lauderdale buyers wait giving you less competition. Here's how to buy smart: flood zones, insurance timing, and more.
Broward single-family homes went under contract in a median of 34 days in July 2026, down from 43 days a year earlier. The longer figures you see quoted, 74 days and roughly 100 days, are measuring something different, and confusing the two costs Fort Lauderdale homeowners real money.
Most people assume that if you are not buying a single-family home or something on the beach, you are settling. Downtown Fort Lauderdale has quietly made that assumption wrong. The newest branded tower coming to Flagler Village starts in the mid $500,000s, and what comes with that number says more about where this city is heading than any headline about the luxury market does.
This is the question I get more than any other right now, and most agents answer it with a sales pitch. Here is the actual answer: Fort Lauderdale condos are carrying roughly 11 months of supply while single-family homes sit near 4.8 months. That gap is not noise. It tells you exactly where the leverage is, and exactly which condos are still a good buy.
Fort Lauderdale's housing market is splitting into two very different environments depending on what you're buying or selling. Single-family homes are sitting at roughly 4.8 months of supply, a fairly balanced market, while condos have surged to nearly 11 months of supply, firmly in buyer's-market territory. Homes overall are also taking longer to sell, averaging 99 days in July 2026 compared to 86 days a year ago, with a sale-to-list ratio of 94.23%, down slightly from last year.
Broward County looks flat while Fort Lauderdale is up 17.6% year over year. Here's why the countywide number misleads buyers and sellers and what to watch.
A Fort Lauderdale waterfront estate sat on the market for eight years before it sold. Lourdes breaks down the price history, what went wrong, and the real cost of waiting.
