Palm Beach commercial sales rose 80% year-over-year in Q1 2026. Multifamily +121%, industrial +83%, retail +84%. The capital is deploying — just not uniformly.
South Florida's Q1 2026 commercial sales report from MIAMI REALTORS®, published in mid-April, contains a headline that reads cleaner than the underlying picture. Aggregate South Florida commercial sales volume was essentially flat year-over-year at $2.86 billion — down 1%. Within that aggregate:
The divergence matters more than the aggregate. Palm Beach County's 80% surge is not a statistical fluke — it's the continuation of a multi-year capital deployment pattern that has turned the county into the principal destination for branded-residence development and the secondary market for hospitality capital that has priced out of prime Miami Beach submarkets.
The Live Local Act has been a significant accelerant. The law, now in its fourth iteration after the passage of HB 1389 in March 2026, has generated 55,000 proposed units across 182 projects statewide. As of March 2026, 6,316 units across 14 projects were already under construction. The top five counties for Live Local Act projects — in order — are Miami-Dade, Hillsborough, Broward, Palm Beach, and Orange. In South Florida specifically, 5,427 Fully Affordable multifamily units are under construction as of January 2026 per Yardi Matrix, with 3,515 scheduled to complete in 2026 — the highest annual completion count since 2024's 3,625 units.
Full-year 2025 Miami-Dade commercial sales volume reached $7.1 billion, the highest level in years. What the Q1 2026 data suggests is not a softening — it's a rotation. The capital is moving from Miami-Dade (where the trophy segment is at full value and multifamily deal flow has slowed as inventory thins) into Palm Beach County (where branded residences and workforce housing projects are opening new investment aperture), and into Broward County's workforce housing product, where Q1 rents rose +13% in Workforce-Upper and +9.7% in Workforce-Lower.
South Florida's 2026 capital deployment is not cooling. It's redistributing. Palm Beach County is the market where the year-over-year velocity is highest. Miami-Dade office — driven by HQ relocations and Brickell demand — is outperforming other Miami-Dade sectors. The investors who want the trend, not the headline, should be running the submarket-by-asset-class decomposition, not the aggregate.