Palm Beach County Retail: $641 to $74, one county

Retail in this county runs from $641 per square foot to $74 per square foot. Same county, same dataset, same six years of recorded deeds. Any single number you have been handed for "Palm Beach retail" sits somewhere inside a spread of nearly nine to one, and where it sits was decided by which deals happened to close.

Drive west until the price collapses

The city ladder for retail covers fourteen Palm Beach County cities with at least a dozen recorded sales each. It is the most geographically honest thing in my dataset, so I want to walk it rather than summarize it.

The coastal top

Delray Beach leads at $641 per foot off 80 sales, which is a deep count for a city that size. Boca Raton follows at $583 off 47. Boynton Beach is $492 off 47, Jupiter $456 off 28, and Palm Beach Gardens $424 off 14. Five cities, all coastal or near it, all above $420.

The broad middle

West Palm Beach medians $383 off 159 sales. That is the single largest retail sample in the county and the closest thing here to a true market clearing price, because 159 transactions are hard to skew. North Palm Beach is $366 off 18, Greenacres $334 off 20, Lake Worth $325 off 99, Palm Springs $323 off 23, Lantana $311 off 18. Lake Worth deserves a note: 99 sales is the second-deepest count in the county and it prices $58 under West Palm Beach.

Where the coast stops

Lake Park is $226 off 26 sales and Riviera Beach $217 off 31. Then Belle Glade, out on the western edge of the county in the agricultural interior, medians $74 per square foot off 23 recorded sales.

Twenty-three sales is a real sample. That number is not an error and it is not a rounding artifact. It is what retail buildings actually trade for in a farming town on the far side of the county, in a market whose marketing behaves as though the western half is not there. Delray Beach at $641 is 8.7 times Belle Glade at $74. Both are Palm Beach County.

I include Belle Glade for the same reason I include the thin trophy numbers on the barrier island. A county median that quietly drops its cheapest and its most expensive corners is not a median. It is a marketing position.

Retail is the widest asset I track, and it is not close

Across 689 arm's-length retail transfers in 29 cities from 2021 through 2026, the county median is $389 per square foot. The 25th percentile is $228 and the 75th is $726. The middle half of the market spans 3.18x. For comparison, the same interquartile spread is 2.32x in office and 1.80x in industrial.

The median retail building was 4,750 SF, built in 1977, and sold for $2,350,000. Broward retail medians $342 off 622 sales and Miami-Dade $454 off 721. Palm Beach at $389 sits between them, which tells you almost nothing useful about your specific center.

Then size takes another bite

Geography explains part of the spread. Building size explains a large part of the rest. Sorted by size, the same 689 sales look like this:

• Under 2,500 SF: $478 per foot, 152 sales
• 2,500 to 10,000 SF: $432, 366 sales
• 10,000 to 25,000 SF: $302, 96 sales
• 25,000 to 50,000 SF: $271, 32 sales
• 50,000 SF and up: $225 per foot, 43 sales

That is a clean 2.12x gradient from the smallest band to the largest, and unlike office it does not wobble in the middle. A single-tenant 1,800 SF storefront and a 60,000 SF anchored center are not the same asset class wearing different sizes. They price differently because they sell to different buyers with different financing.

Combine the two effects and you can see how a $389 county median gets built and why it fits so few actual buildings. A small storefront in Delray and a large anchored center out west are both "Palm Beach County retail" and there is a factor of several between them.

The year-by-year line is a mix report

Retail medians by year of sale: $359 in 2021 off 149 sales, $327 in 2022 off 146, $412 in 2023 off 113, $503 in 2024 off 116, $391 in 2025 off 128, and $389 so far in 2026 off 37. The 2024 peak at $503 is the one people quote at me. It is followed by a 22 percent drop in 2025 with a nearly identical sale count.

Retail did not lose 22 percent of its value in a year. That number is doing more work than it should. With a 2.12x size gradient and an 8.7x geographic spread, roughly 120 sales a year is not enough volume to hold the mix steady, and the median moves when the mix moves.

The customer economy underneath

Retail buildings are a bet on local household spending, so the demographics matter more here than in the other two asset classes. Palm Beach County has the best of them in South Florida, and they are still mixed.

Median household income was $84,789 in the Census Bureau's 2024 American Community Survey one-year estimate, above the $81,604 national figure and the highest of the three South Florida counties. The average weekly wage was $1,784 in Q1 2026 per the BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, up 7.1 percent year over year against 3.9 percent nationally. That is the fastest wage growth of the three counties and nearly double the national pace. Money in the county is getting bigger.

The number of people is not. Census estimates show the county added 1,578 residents, one tenth of one percent, between July 2024 and July 2025, and only because 14,302 international arrivals covered 11,953 net domestic departures. BLS reported the West Palm Beach-Boca Raton-Delray Beach Metropolitan Division at 697,300 payroll jobs in July 2026, preliminary and not seasonally adjusted, up 3,700 or 0.5 percent. Retail trade employment specifically was down 0.1 percent. Unemployment was 4.8 percent, up from 4.1 percent a year earlier and above the 4.4 percent national rate, and QCEW covered employment fell 2,832 comparing March 2026 to March 2025.

The read I give clients: this is a market where the customers are getting wealthier faster than anywhere else in South Florida and are not getting more numerous. That favors quality of trade area over raw rooftop counts, and it makes the geographic spread in the ladder more durable rather than less.

What this means when you actually price something

If you own retail here, the county median is the wrong starting point. Start with the two facts that move your number most: which size band your building lands in, and which side of the coastal line it sits on. A 6,000 SF strip in Boynton and a 40,000 SF center out west are separated by both variables at once, and the county figure sits in the middle of them being useful to neither.

I run this as a written analysis, band-matched and corridor-matched, in a broker opinion of value. If you are shopping for space instead of pricing a building, that is retail tenant representation, and the same spread that hurts an over-priced seller is the thing you use at the table. The full county picture across office, retail and industrial is in my Palm Beach County market report.