More CRE Pros Are Splitting Time Between NYC And Miami. Here's How They Make It Work
It’s 4:15 a.m. when the alarm goes off in Stephen Palmese’s New York apartment. About once a week, his workday begins just like this — waking up before sunrise to start a 21-hour whirlwind of travel.
As managing principal of lender and developer Integritas Capital, Palmese operates in both New York City and Miami, a balance more and more commercial real estate professionals are striking as business and wealth migrate to South Florida.
Palmese plans the days he has to travel to Miami by the minute. He’s in an Uber to LaGuardia Airport by 5 a.m. and through security and at his gate 26 minutes later.
His mornings have changed over time, but he always takes the earliest possible flight. Now-defunct Spirit Airlines used to have a 6 a.m. option, but now, Palmese takes the 6:30 a.m. flights JetBlue or Delta offer. He prefers JetBlue, he said, because it's a shorter walk by eight minutes.
Once he boards the plane, he’s working on his laptop until he lands in the Magic City, striving to make his first meeting at 9:10 a.m. From there, he has meetings every hour on the hour, including for a 57-story hotel and apartment tower he is planning in Fort Lauderdale.
That momentum continues on his flight home at 8:50 p.m., where he catches up on missed emails. Palmese typically doesn’t make it back to his apartment until at least 1 a.m.
“Hopefully I'll get some sleep eventually,” Palmese said. “Until then, I'm just motivated.”
A decade ago, South Florida was mostly a vacation or retirement spot for New York-based professionals. Today, many New York-based commercial real estate professionals' lives are split between the two cities. While some fly down once a month for a few days at a time, others fly down every week, every other week or at a moment's notice.
Miami's lower taxes, lighter business regulations, connections to Latin America and long history of welcoming New York’s big CRE players — not to mention the weather — have drawn those living a dual lifestyle, and the way business gets done is changing because of it.
Miami neighborhoods are unrecognizable compared to before the pandemic as the city ushers in a new and wealthier crowd. Developers are building skyscrapers and high-density projects in areas like Wynwood, transforming what used to be an industrial district into an affluent artistic neighborhood.
Corporate migrants have flocked to towers in Brickell, pushing office rents close to Manhattan levels, effectively changing the city’s office market forever.
Citadel billionaire Ken Griffin kicked off the trend in earnest, moving his hedge fund to the city in 2022 and planning to build a 1.7M SF skyscraper to house its headquarters. Now, many of the companies that followed Citadel to Miami during the pandemic-era boom are expanding their footprints.
The demand for more development was palpable. Between 2020 and 2025, Miami-Dade County’s population grew by more than 100,000 people, according to the Census Bureau. Miami has been among the cities with the highest levels of housing construction, and much of that has been built by New York-based developers.
“We definitely viewed it as an opportunity where we felt like that market had a lot of room to grow, and we started to see it grow,” said Matthew Baron, founder and president of Manhattan-based Baron Property Group. “Definitely, that was part of the calculus of us wanting to do more down there.”
The state and the city have welcomed the business with open arms and are campaigning for more.
Florida repealed a rent tax last year, lowering costs on companies leasing office, retail and industrial space. The Florida Council of 100 launched an initiative titled Ambition Accelerated to market Florida’s tax benefits and lighter business regulations to out-of-state executives, with Griffin and Related Cos. founder Stephen Ross pledging a combined $10M.
As the nation's wealthiest flee “tax-the-rich” politics in other areas of the country, South Florida is only looking better in the eyes of real estate pros.
“We've become a sexy market,” said Laura Tauber, president of Miami-based developer Taubco.
A Foot In 2 Markets
Spencer Levine's focus on his days in Miami is maximizing efficiency, but he makes sure to take time to appreciate the Sunshine State for its namesake, especially during the winter.
“There's something really special about waking up at 6 a.m. in South Florida and going outside and having a cup of coffee and my iPad,” he said.
The president of New York developer RAL Cos. packs his days full of meetings and nights full of team-building dinners. He eschews staying in the same hotel every time, just choosing the most cost-efficient option and closest to a work site.
“Most people know South Florida as traveling there for vacation,” Levine said. “I'm not sitting by a pool, not having drinks with umbrellas in them.”
RAL first entered Miami supporting the bankruptcy estate of Lehman Brothers for what was then the Canyon Ranch Hotel & Spa in Miami Beach in the mid-2010s.
Most of the company's developments are apartment towers in Brooklyn and Manhattan, but Levine has worked for years on developing and repositioning properties throughout Miami Beach and the Design District, he said.
These days, his local focus at RAL Cos. is as the development manager for a 297-unit, 820-bed Florida International University student housing project in the Sweetwater neighborhood. The company is also a partner on the project, called Casa at FIU, and Levine has found he is spending more time in Miami as he tries to get the building open to students by 2028.
He travels to Miami at least once a month and no longer than two nights in a row so he can get home to his wife, 15-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. Even so, he always seems to overpack his khaki pants and button-down or polo shirts.
Other New York developers have had ties to South Florida for decades. Baron first purchased a condo in Sunny Isles Beach 21 years ago.
When he and his wife and three children were spending spring break at the condo in 2020, the weeklong vacation turned into a five-month stay when the entire world shut down due to the pandemic.
As time went on, Miami started reopening before the rest of the country.
“That was the beginning of, ‘Hey, we're here. Let's see if we can do some business,’ and it was at the end of 2020 that it started to heat up for us,” Baron said.
Now the company is building a 2.3M SF transit-oriented residential project in Hialeah and an 806-unit project in Coral Gables.
Baron typically spends at least two days in Miami every other week. He flies with whatever airline suits his traveling needs but often charters a private jet with Slate Aviation or JSX Aviation.
He tries his best to preserve his morning routine, waking up around 6 a.m. and working out with his personal trainer — in person in New York and virtually in Miami — before moving on with work for the day. In Miami, a driver often takes him to and from meetings and sites, he said.
“I don't really spend time in the office when I'm [in Miami],” Baron said. “I try to maximize my time by visiting our sites, visiting our projects and just meeting with various people. I'm constantly running around and going to meetings.”
Rena Kliot travels fluidly between the two markets for her work as a residential and commercial real estate broker.
She started in New York before expanding her business to Miami in 2004. She moved to the Aventura neighborhood with her two sons as a single mother a year later. Kliot founded Pulse International Realty, headquartered in Miami Beach, in 2007.
“It's such a natural move to make, even more so now,” Kliot said. “I got [to Miami] and I was just this New York snob. I was like, ‘There's nowhere to eat, there's no theater, there's no nothing, there's no culture.’”
Kliot, who now has a son in each city, only books one-way tickets because she travels where she is needed, when she is needed.
“In terms of the commute, it's not for the weary,” Kliot said. “You definitely need to have the right kind of energy to sustain this sort of a lifestyle.”
Cultural Shift
The top relocation destination for New York residents is Florida, according to a 2025 MovingPlace report, and it's no competition either. Florida leads the board by 10%.
New Yorkers were also the largest domestic migrant group to Miami-Dade as of 2024, according to state-to-state migration data from the Census Bureau.
The changes are evident, particularly on the roads. Miami ranked as the second-most-traffic-congested metro area in the United States, behind only Los Angeles, according to a report location technology firm TomTom released earlier this year.
“It was like when they started coming, you hurry a little bit more, a little more,” said Donna Abood, a longtime Miami-based office broker, now with Savills. “Now, [during] rush hour there's all kinds of horns going on downtown.”
As more people move in, demand for office space to accommodate the growing workforce follows, quickening the pace of business deals in Miami. Abood said her work with New York companies has increased by 40%.
The biggest difference New York professionals have noticed between the two cities is New York’s all-day grind in the office compared to Miami’s more casual work culture.
“The same gentleman that I'm showing a hotel to in New York, he's buttoned up, he's ready, he's serious, we're having conversation, we're in the boardroom,” Kliot said. “They come to Florida [and] they're in their bathing suits, they don't have the patience to listen to my pitch, they just want to get out there.”
“That's changing, too,” she added. “People are taking Florida more seriously, and the Floridians are taking business more seriously.”
“I still don't know how to dress for Miami,” Palmese admitted, calling the city more colorful not just with its clothing but also its culture.
“There's definitely a much more casual approach to business,” he said. “Not that they're not serious about business. It's just much more casual.”
But the state and local politicians have largely welcomed the real estate industry, understanding it is key to helping the area build its way out of a growing affordability crisis, where nearly half the population is struggling to make ends meet.
Miami-Dade County’s population dropped by more than 10,000 between 2024 and 2025, placing it among the top three counties in the nation with the largest population declines, according to the Census Bureau. The people leaving are largely on the lower end of the income spectrum.
But Florida has turned to developers to help combat that problem. The state has passed incentives like the Live Local Act to push developers to dedicate at least 40% of their projects to workforce or affordable housing to receive tax benefits.
“I think that the people [in Miami], especially the elected officials, want to see you succeed,” Baron said. “They want to see the city grow.”
Within the first few months of 2026, a handful of billionaires fled to Miami, generating talks of a wealth boom amid proposed wealth taxes in California and Washington state and a pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes in New York.
“It's a different way of operating down there where, as a developer and an investor, you're viewed more as a partner and somebody that's adding and creating value, whereas up in New York, you're viewed as the enemy, no matter what,” Baron said.
