From the Podium to the Penthouse: Why Formula 1 Drivers Are Buying Miami Real Estate

Three current Formula 1 drivers now own homes in Miami. Sergio “Checo” Pérez secured a residence at the St. Regis Residences in Brickell; Charles Leclerc chose EDITION Residences Miami Edgewater; Pierre Gasly signed at Jean-Georges Miami Tropic Residences at the gateway to the Design District. Each of them arrived through the same door: the Miami Grand Prix, a race now contracted to run through 2041, longer than any other event on the Formula 1 calendar. I don’t read these purchases as celebrity trivia. Read together, they describe something larger: the moment a city stops being a destination on the calendar and becomes a place where the sport’s global ecosystem chooses to live. I watched it happen from closer than most. During the most recent race weekend, one of my own clients decided to buy.

A Race With a Twenty-Year Horizon

The 2026 edition ran May 1–3 at the Miami International Autodrome in Miami Gardens, with Kimi Antonelli taking the win on Sunday. But the more consequential date came a year earlier, when Formula 1 and South Florida Motorsports extended the race through 2041: a twenty-year commitment from the sport to one city, made after a 2024 edition that drew a record 275,000 attendees. That gives Miami something no marketing budget can buy, an annual, guaranteed gathering of the world’s most mobile wealth. Drivers are only the visible tier. Around them travel team principals, sponsors, entrepreneurs, family offices, collectors, and spectators who already know Monaco, London, Dubai, and New York, and who now measure Miami against that list. Unlike a property exhibition, the Grand Prix lets them discover the city organically. They arrive for the race. They leave having experienced Miami.

The Drivers Who Bought

The Douglas Elliman Thread

There is a detail running through these transactions that matters to my practice. Two of the three buildings the drivers chose — EDITION Residences Miami Edgewater and Jean-Georges Miami Tropic — are sold exclusively through Douglas Elliman Development Marketing, the development arm of my own brokerage. So is Colette Residences, the boutique address rising at 1880 Brickell Avenue: thirty-eight residences across five stories, from the low $3Ms, representing the other movement I watch closely. Fewer neighbors, more privacy, a quieter definition of luxury. When the buildings the grid is choosing are the same buildings my colleagues and I represent, race-week conversations have a way of ending in floor plans.

What I Saw During Race Week

For me this is not market theory. Around the most recent Grand Prix we hosted several prospective buyers in the city, among them a serious automobile collector. Over that weekend he made his decision: a residence at Bentley Residences in Sunny Isles Beach. The logic was personal, not financial. Cars are part of his identity, and Bentley’s tower is built around exactly that: the Dezervator car elevator carries residents, cars and all, up to private garages inside their own residences, so the collection lives where the collector does. At this level of the market, people are rarely buying square footage. They are buying something that reflects who they are. Miami understood this earlier than any other American city. Aston Martin Residences translated a racing marque into a 66-story tower on the Miami River, with two-time world champion Fernando Alonso the public face of the brand’s Formula 1 project, and Pagani Residences brought a hypercar maker to North Bay Village. Automotive design, hospitality, and residential living now occupy the same space here, part of a branded-residence landscape that Douglas Elliman and Knight Frank’s research ranks the deepest in the country. Formula 1 delivers precisely the audience those buildings were designed for.

Why Miami

Formula 1 drivers can live almost anywhere, and most already know Monaco, London, Paris, Dubai, and New York firsthand. So why here? From my seat advising international buyers, the answer is never one number. The financial layer is real: dollar-denominated assets, a deep and transparent property market, Florida’s tax posture. But sophisticated buyers weigh legal stability, privacy, security, and connectivity with equal seriousness, and then they weigh lifestyle hardest of all: waterfront living, restaurants, boating, schools, weather, and a city where business, culture, and sport now happen at a global level. Years ago, international clients approached Miami as a diversification play, a second home holding dollars. Today they want to spend real time here. Miami is no longer competing only for international capital. It is competing for international lives, and that is a far stronger position.

A Longer History Than the Grand Prix

Racing money in South Florida is not new. Former F1 driver Enrique Bernoldi bought at Continuum on South Beach in 2014 and sold for $6 million three years later before trading up to Fisher Island, in an era when trade records already counted Helio Castroneves and Eddie Irvine among the professional drivers calling greater Miami home. All of that predates the race. What the Grand Prix changed is scale and visibility. Max Verstappen won the inaugural Miami race in 2022; four editions later, the event has team owners entertaining buyers in hospitality suites, drivers signing contracts on towers still in construction, and a confirmed place on the calendar into the 2040s. Formula 1 did not create modern Miami; the financial firms, the international families, and the new towers were already here. What the race did was put the city, every May, in front of exactly the audience most likely to understand what it has become. Some visitors board a plane on Monday. Some return the following year. And some begin looking at floor plans. That is the moment a race stops being an event and becomes part of the city’s real estate story.

Frequently Asked Questions

For private guidance on the residences Formula 1 keeps discovering, from Brickell to Sunny Isles Beach, contact Juan Pablo Chacón of Douglas Elliman.