Real estate agents now plan listings around SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs instead of Wall Street bonuses. The shift reflects where new centimillionaire buyers come from.
The calendar that governs ultra-luxury real estate listings has flipped. For years, listing a $50 million Palm Beach estate meant timing it around Wall Street bonus season. That playbook is being rewritten. Real estate firms now plan their big-money listings around tech IPOs, specifically the upcoming debuts of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The change reflects a deeper structural shift in where the next wave of centimillionaire buyers will come from.
Ryan Serhant, founder and CEO of Serhant, summed it up directly: "It used to be we'd plan our seasonality around Wall Street – we'd list [big properties] right around bonus season. These tech IPOs are how we plan now." The comment came during a holiday weekend when rain kept many New Yorkers indoors. Soon-to-be billionaires were already scouting Florida and Hamptons properties.
The shift is not subtle. In 2021, the most expensive home ever to sell in Florida closed for about $130 million in Palm Beach. By 2024, nine-figure sales had become routine: 10 homes in the U.S. sold for more than $100 million that year, including a Naples, Fla. property that went for $225 million. In 2024 there were seven such sales. The volume and price points are climbing as the buyer pool expands beyond traditional finance.
The conventional wisdom holds that bonus season (typically January through March) drives the most expensive home sales. That assumption leads agents to front-load their marketing budgets and splashy open houses in the first quarter. It also leads public market investors to expect cyclical pops in luxury homebuilder stocks and REITs tied to coastal markets.
That framework is now dated. The real catalyst for the highest-tier sales is no longer a year-end bonus pool from Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. It is the liquidity event of a tech IPO that turns thousands of employees into instant millionaires and a handful of founders into billionaires. The scale is different: a single SpaceX IPO could create more liquid wealth than an entire Wall Street bonus season combined. The geography also shifts. Buyers no longer automatically gravitate toward Manhattan or Greenwich. They head to Miami, Palm Beach, Naples, and even Montana.
San Francisco luxury home sales jumped 22% year-over-year in early 2026, with the median luxury home price approaching $6.8 million. Even quieter pockets like Montana and other Western ranch markets are seeing strong demand, particularly from tech buyers seeking large land tracts with room for private airstrips and future development.
Nathan Zeder, a top Florida agent with The Jills Zeder Group who has closed multiple nine-figure deals, confirmed that demand is already elevated. "We've had a ton of people looking and a great start to the year," he said. "The amount of wealth about to be generated will be enormous."
For real estate agents, lenders, and investors alike, the practical shift is clear: watch the IPO pipeline, not the compensation calendar. The list of upcoming private tech debuts reads like a who's who of the most valuable startups in the world.
These three events alone could inject tens of billions of dollars of new liquid wealth into the system. Real estate firms are already adapting their marketing to the speed of this buyer class. Serhant noted that his firm has shifted from long-form YouTube property tours to quick iPhone videos posted on Instagram stories, TikTok, and private group chats. Properties that once took months to sell now move in days with all-cash offers.
Serhant explained the marketing pivot: "We used to do longer-form marketing tours – long YouTube property tours because it would take longer to sell." Now he is uploading quick iPhone videos to Instagram stories, TikTok, and in group chats. The transaction velocity has accelerated accordingly. A property that once sat on the market for months now closes in days, with no financing contingencies.
One unsung accelerant: state-level tax and regulatory climate. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has publicly floated ideas about abolishing private property for landlords. That kind of rhetoric drives high-net-worth individuals toward more business-friendly states. Florida benefits disproportionately. Serhant described the state's appeal: "If you want to be in a low-tax, business-friendly state, on the ocean, with a better time zone to Europe, there's nowhere else."
In 2021, the most expensive home to ever sell in Florida closed for approximately $130 million in Palm Beach. Since then, nine-figure sale prices have become more common. Last year, 10 homes in the US sold for more than $100 million, with a Naples, Fla. home going for $225 million. In 2024, there were seven homes in the country that sold for nine figures. The trend line is clear: the top end of the market is expanding, and the buyers are increasingly from tech, not finance.
The read-through for listed real estate companies and REITs is not direct. Publicly traded luxury homebuilders (e.g., Toll Brothers, Lennar) and brokerage firms (e.g., Compass, Douglas Elliman) benefit indirectly when the ultra-luxury segment accelerates. The specific IPO-driven demand is concentrated in the highest price brackets, which represent a small fraction of overall transaction volume.
A more direct play is the geographic footprint of these firms. Brokers with large market share in Florida, the Hamptons, and California coastal luxury markets stand to gain the most. Conversely, if upcoming tech IPOs are delayed or valuations compress, that pipeline of liquid wealth dries up, and luxury listings could slow sharply.
For a deeper look at one of the largest impending IPOs, see our analysis of Anthropic's $65B raise and what it signals for AI valuations. And for a broader view of how wealth creation drives sector performance, visit our stock market analysis hub.
The key question for the next 12 months: do the SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI IPOs actually happen on the expected timeline? If they do, expect real estate agents in Palm Beach and Naples to keep their iPhone cameras ready. If they slip, the luxury market may face an unexpected gap in buyer demand – one that no Wall Street bonus season can fill.
Prepared with AlphaScala research tooling and grounded in primary market data: live prices, fundamentals, SEC filings, hedge-fund holdings, and insider activity. Each story is checked against AlphaScala publishing rules before release. Educational coverage, not personalized advice.