Vanishing Over Viral: The New Rule of South Florida Ultra-Luxury Real Estate

There are two kinds of $25 million waterfront sales happening right now in Palm Beach and Broward counties.

Type One gets 400,000 views on a YouTube tour before the ink dries on the contract. The drone footage is spectacular. The comments are brutal. Within a week the floor plan is on a burglary forum, the kids’ bedrooms are labeled, and the seller is fielding DMs from crypto bros asking if the wine cellar is included.

Type Two closes in complete silence. The buyer wires funds from a Cayman entity. The seller’s name never appears in the public records until the deed is re-recorded six months later under an LLC managed by a Delaware trustee. Nobody outside of three people and two attorneys ever knows the property changed hands.

Guess which one nets more money, closes faster, and lets the seller sleep at night.

In 2025, the smartest capital in South Florida has made its choice crystal clear: they would rather vanish than go viral.

Vanishing means:

• No public MLS entry. Ever.
• No professional photography until the buyer is fully vetted and under ironclad NDA.
• Showings scheduled like a clandestine rendezvous: one party at a time, security escorts, phones surrendered at the gate.
• Purchase price and terms that stay buried forever behind layered LLCs and confidentiality clauses written in granite.

Viral means surrendering your legacy compound to the permanent internet. Once those interior photos are scraped by data aggregators, they’re immortal. Try selling (or insuring) that house again in ten years when every teenager in America has already taken a virtual tour.

I had a client last quarter who turned down a public listing that would have generated twenty competing offers and probably pushed the price north of $40 million. Instead we handled it off-market, showed it to exactly four buyers, and closed at $37.8 million in nineteen days. Zero photos leaked. Zero headlines. The seller flew out of PBI the next morning and nobody on the island even knew the house was for sale.

That’s the premium people are now willing to pay: the premium for disappearance.

If your definition of winning a real estate transaction is seeing your marble foyer trend on TikTok, there are a hundred brokerages that will happily light the match.

If your definition of winning is waking up six months from now and realizing the entire world still has no idea you just cashed out of an eight-figure waterfront estate… then there’s really only one move.

Choose to vanish.

We’ve made it our entire business.

Important Disclaimer Gail Kennell and Sea Crown Estates are licensed Florida real estate brokers, not tax attorneys or CPAs. Nothing in this article constitutes tax or legal advice. All 1031 exchange and Delaware Statutory Trust strategies must be reviewed and approved by your own qualified tax and legal advisors before implementation.

Principal Broker Sea Crown Estates (954) 410-0162 [email protected]

Sea Crown Estates | We don’t do viral. We do gone.