Miami: family becomes a real estate strategy — at two completely opposite ends of wealth

In Coconut Grove, a family reorganized its finances to buy a house with extra space so the grandparents could live with the rest of the family. A few miles away, in January of this year, two neighboring properties were bought for $173.4 million — the smaller one a mansion on Biscayne Bay — to be converted into a single private compound. Budgets that cannot be compared. Yet the underlying logic is curiously similar: keeping the family within the same perimeter.

Miami is living both stories at once, and they rarely appear side by side.

Multigenerational buying as a response to a budget that does not add up

According to Realtor.com, Miami is already among the East Coast regions where more than 6% of households are multigenerational — well above the national average of around 4.5%, according to the U.S. Census. The National Association of Realtors' 2026 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends report puts Generation X (ages 46 to 60) in the lead for this kind of purchase: almost one in five buyers in this age group chose a multigenerational home. Caring for older parents, saving money, and welcoming adult children back home lead the reasons given.

Florida has a demographic structure that drives this movement in its own right — it is among the states with the highest proportion of residents over age 65 in the country. For many Miami families, the calculation is straightforward: sharing a mortgage, insurance, and association fees across two or three generations often weighs less than maintaining two separate addresses in a city where housing costs have risen sharply.

“Landmaxxing” as a response to money to spare

At the top of the pyramid, the movement has another name and another logic. Brokerages such as Coldwell Banker have been calling “landmaxxing” the race by ultrawealthy buyers to acquire the neighboring lot, the parcel next door, the house on the corner — until the address becomes a private compound. Coldwell Banker's own 2026 midyear report recorded a 97% increase in searches for land and a 146% increase in searches for unique properties — historic mansions, private islands, and branded residences.

Miami concentrates much of this activity. Jeff Bezos has already invested more than $230 million assembling three properties on Indian Creek Island. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has spent $114 million since 2020 buying at least five neighboring homes on the Sunset Islands. A vehicle connected to the family office of Canadian businessman Lino Saputo paid $16.5 million for a property on Allison Island — which already had the lot next door in its own name, doubling its land in one move. The explanation most often cited by the agents who close these deals: with limited coastline and virtually no land inventory left, assembling adjacent lots has become the only path to scale.

The common thread that goes unnoticed

The two ends of the market — the family sharing expenses to fit under one roof and the billionaire buying a neighbor's home to expand a perimeter — each respond in their own way to the same pressure: desirable space in Miami is scarce, and bringing more than one property under a single family structure has become a strategy, not a coincidence. The difference is the stated reason. For one group, it is financial survival in a market that became too expensive too quickly. For the other, it is wealth protection, privacy, and — according to luxury agents interviewed by The Wall Street Journal — a hedge against inflation, since well-located land cannot be recreated.

The side effect is similar in both cases: each property absorbed into a compound — whether for a family or for wealth — leaves the available inventory of that neighborhood for good. In markets such as Indian Creek, the Sunset Islands, or Palm Island, this is already apparent in the scarcity of homes for sale.

For anyone representing a buyer or seller in Miami today, understanding which of these two logics is on the other side of the table changes the entire negotiation strategy — from the structure of an offer to the appetite for time and confidentiality in the transaction.

Official sources consulted:

1. National Association of Realtors — 2026 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report
2. Realtor.com Research, cited by Laughlin Tanner Group — multigenerational household data by metro area, May 2026
3. U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey (multigenerational household data)
4. Coldwell Banker Global Luxury — 2026 Mid-Year Luxury Report, cited by Florida Realtors (August 2026)