We’ve seen Brazilians buying up Manhattan, and now it’s Russians taking luxury property in Miami:
Six homes sold on Star in 2011, Ms. Hertzberg said. The cheapest sale was a piece of land that went for about $6 million, and the most expensive was a 9-bedroom 11-bath home to Roustam Tariko, the founder of Russian Standard vodka, for $25.5 million.
Throughout Miami, about 15 single-family homes sold for more than $6 million apiece in 2011, Ms. Hertzberg said. Of those, about 40 percent were sold to Russians, with the remainder split about evenly between Americans and South Americans, brokers said.
The fact that very rich people buy very expensive property isn’t news, but the recovery in high end Miami real estate is notable since on the mass level the Florida market (along with Arizona, Nevada, and the Inland Empire in Southern California) is one of the areas most glutted with foreclosures. But the kind of people able to spend $6 million on what’s probably a second or third home are playing a whole different game from the rest of us.
