By the time a luxury home in Palm Beach hits the market, it’s already sold—and has been for months. The buyer is someone who’s hacking the luxury housing market by working with a broker and quietly joined a developer’s private waitlist before the blueprints were even drawn.
This is the subscription economy for billionaires, and it’s reshaping how the ultra-wealthy buy homes across America. Ultrawealthy buyers are now securing spots on private waitlists months—or even years—before a home breaks ground.
This is happening particularly in the custom luxury space where buyers are heavily focused on quality and craftsmanship, said Robert W. Burrage, founder and CEO of RWB Construction Management in Palm Beach County, Fla.—a metro area growing increasingly popular among billionaires and other ultrawealthy individuals like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The region, often dubbed “Wall Street South” for its influx of hedge funds and finance executives, has seen luxury home prices soar 187% over the past decade, more than any other major metro, according to Redfin…