Jeff Bezos may have a beach house to go with his $237 million Miami compound.
In September, a Delaware LLC paid $69.5 million for a 17,500-square-foot oceanfront estate at 255 Ocean Boulevard in Golden Beach, an exclusive oceanfront town in Miami-Dade County, a public records search by Fortune found. The buyer was a Delaware LLC, a structure that keeps the person behind the deal out of public view.
But agents and other sources in town have pointed to Bezos, according to The Real Deal, and say he’d likely treat the property as a beach house. Public records list the buyer as Meridian Coast LLC. Bezos hasn’t publicly confirmed the deal, and representatives for Bezos didn’t immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Routing purchases through LLCs and trusts has become a more common practice among the ultrawealthy, who increasingly see public attention as a security risk.
“The goal is to ensure that, even if someone digs into ownership records, they still cannot easily connect the property back to the principal owner,” Ken DeLeon, founder of Palo Alto, Calif.-based DeLeon Realty, told Fortune earlier this year.
The beach house is only about a 30-minute drive from his compound in Indian Creek, also known as “Billionaire Bunker,” a 300-acre, man-made strip of land that has attracted the ultrawealthy. But for buyers at Bezos’ level, owning another home near the one they already have isn’t redundant, Mendel Fellig, founder of the Miami Beach-based Mendel Fellig Group at Compass, told Fortune.
“A buyer may already have an incredible waterfront home but also want direct access to a private stretch of beach,” Fellig said. “Golden Beach is one of the few places in Miami that can offer that. The second property becomes an extension of their lifestyle—almost an amenity in itself.”
The deal set a record for a single-family home in Golden Beach, according to The Real Deal. The house has seven bedrooms and 12 bathrooms, plus a guest house, a pool and spa, and 100 feet of water frontage. It hit the market in February for $88.5 million, public records reviewed by Fortune show, and was later cut to $79.5 million.
“Acquiring a whole portfolio gives these buyers access to different residential experiences for their lifestyle while securing properties that are increasingly difficult to replicate or replace,” Felling added.
To be sure, Devin Kay of Douglas Elliman told Fox Business recognizable names tend to get attached to blockbuster deals when a buyer’s identity is hidden.
“The reality is that South Florida’s billionaire buyer pool has expanded considerably,” Kay told Fox Business. “There are international business owners, hedge fund executives, technology founders and multi-generational families quietly acquiring some of the most valuable real estate in the region.”
But if Bezos is the buyer, the Golden Beach home would join a portfolio he started building after leaving Seattle for Miami in 2023. He said at the time he wanted to be closer to his parents and to Blue Origin’s operations at Cape Canaveral, but the move has also paid off at tax time. Florida has no state income or capital gains tax, and Bezos saved an estimated $1 billion in 2024 alone, Fortune previously reported, citing a Forbes calculation he would have owed about $954 million in Washington state capital gains tax on his Amazon stock sales that year.
Can Miami’s luxury market keep climbing?
Part of what drives these purchases is that there’s so little to buy.
Fellig says one of his clients recently bought a home for $30 million and got a $35 million offer to sell it a month later.
“He declined because he couldn’t replace what he had,” Fellig said. “That’s the dynamic in these exclusive neighborhoods—even when someone is willing to pay more, there may be nowhere comparable for the owner to go.”
Still, Fellig cautions neighbors against reading too much into a headline sale.
“These transactions tend to raise sellers’ expectations, but expectations and actual market value are two different things,” he said. “A nearby owner may see a headline sale and decide their home is suddenly worth 20 percent more. That doesn’t mean buyers will agree.”
Jay Roberts, CEO of Prosper Group and developer of Bugatti Residences Miami, sees demand holding up. He points to buyers leaving higher-tax states and international buyers seeking stability. He told Fortune Miami-Dade’s residential sales above $30 million have already broken the previous annual record. He also credits corporate and institutional investment, including Carnegie Mellon’s planned Miami campus, which Ken Griffin is funding with $2 billion of his record $3 billion gift.
“We believe Miami is still in the early stages of a growth cycle that will compound for decades,” Roberts told Fortune. “People will continue to move here—especially those with a high net worth.”