Fisher Island

Fisher Island lies just south of Miami Beach across Government Cut and has no road or causeway to it. Residents and guests arrive by private boat or by the island's ferry, and that single fact shapes the market more than any amenity does. The island takes its name from Carl G. Fisher, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway co-founder and Miami Beach developer, who bought it in 1919 from the Black businessman and developer Dana A. Dorsey. In the late 1920s Fisher traded part of it to William K. Vanderbilt II in exchange for Vanderbilt's yacht, and Vanderbilt's estate is the heart of today's Fisher Island Club. After his death in 1944 the island passed to the U.S. Steel heir Edward S. Moore, then to the speedboat racer Gar Wood, who sold it in 1963 to an investment group led by Bebe Rebozo that included Richard Nixon.

The Fisher Island Club opened in 1987, and the island has been a private residential community since. It is a census-designated place rather than a city, and a very small one: the 2020 census recorded 561 residents in 197 households, and Bloomberg's 2015 analysis of tax returns put the average income at $2.5 million, the highest of any ZIP code in the country. The gap between the resident count and the number of residences on the island is the clearest measure of how the market here works: this is a second- and third-home address.

The built stock is low-rise and Mediterranean in character, arranged as villages rather than towers — Bayside, Bayview, Seaside, Marina Village, Oceanside — with the Palazzo buildings as the island's contemporary chapter: Palazzo del Mare, Palazzo del Sol in 2016 and Palazzo della Luna, fifty residences over ten floors, in 2019. Most residences look either over the marina and the Atlantic beyond it or back across the water toward South Beach and the Miami skyline.