The Bristol's Median Price Fell 33% in a Year. Nothing About the Building Changed.

If you pulled up two different real estate data trackers this summer and searched for The Bristol, you would have found two very different pictures of the same waterfront tower. One shows a median list price of $15.5 million in June 2026, down from $23.2 million in June 2025. Another shows four closed sales over the trailing year at an average of $2,484 per square foot, with homes sitting on the market for more than a year before closing. Read either number on its own and you would draw a conclusion about where The Bristol is headed. Read them side by side and the real story is different: this building does not have a market in the way a subdivision of 400 homes has a market. It has a handful of transactions a year, and the math that works for a large dataset falls apart when the dataset is this small.

That distinction matters if you are trying to figure out what a residence at 1100 S Flagler Drive is actually worth, whether you are selling one or bidding on one.

Two Trackers, One Tower, Two Different Numbers

Here is what the two most commonly cited figures actually measure, and why they do not agree.

The first row measures asking prices on whatever units happen to be actively listed at a given moment. The rest measure what actually closed over the prior twelve months. Those are not competing views of the same trend. They are two different instruments pointed at two different things, and in a building with only 68 to 69 total residences, the gap between them can look dramatic even when nothing about the building has changed.

Why Averages Break in a 68-Unit Building

A median or an average is only a useful shorthand when there are enough transactions to smooth out the outliers. The Bristol does not generate that volume. Trailing-year sales counts from different trackers put closings anywhere from two to four units. When your entire dataset for a year is two or four sales, a single custom penthouse trade can swing the average by millions, and a single unrenovated unit selling below market can pull the median list price down by a third without a single owner losing value on paper.

That is close to what happened between June 2025 and June 2026. The $23.2 million figure reflected whatever was sitting on the active market that month, likely including a larger or more fully customized residence. The $15.5 million figure a year later reflected a different mix of inventory, not a builder-wide correction. With only five units listed at any given time, whichever five happen to be for sale determines the headline number more than any shift in what buyers are willing to pay.

What Actually Traded, and For How Much

The transactions on record tell a more useful story than the aggregate ever could.

In April 2026, Unit 1801, a four-bedroom residence with an office, spanning 5,544 interior square feet and custom built by Shapiro Pertnoy, closed at a net $19,420,500. The buyers, Alice and Lewis Sanders, purchased it from Linda and Raymond L. Golden. Samantha Curry represented the sellers and Kevin Condon of Sotheby's International Realty represented the buyers. That closing was reported as the priciest condo trade in West Palm Beach for 2026 at the time it recorded. It had been listed roughly four months earlier, in December 2025, at $23.5 million, meaning the eventual sale landed about 17 percent below the original ask, even at the top of this building's price range.

A year earlier, Unit 1401, a corner residence with direct ocean and Intracoastal views, sold for $14.9 million, more than double the $6.9 million it traded for in 2020. The buyer, identified in public records as coal heir John W. Rich Jr., was represented by Antoinette Vigilante of Sotheby's International Realty, with Curry again representing the seller.

Both sales happened inside a building where the record for highest condo sale in Palm Beach County still belongs to a $42.6 million transaction from 2019, a deal Curry closed while representing the developer during the tower's original sellout. Across her run at the building, Curry has been the top-producing broker for six consecutive years, closing more than $446 million in Bristol transactions.

Curry has called it simply "the most coveted address in West Palm Beach," and for a stretch of 2023 she noted that nearly every transaction she closed at the tower had set a new price benchmark.

That kind of run is real, and it is also survivorship bias in miniature. When a building only produces a handful of closings a year, and each one happens to be a full-floor or custom residence, it is easy to mistake a string of record sales for a market-wide trend rather than a reflection of which specific units happened to trade.

The Real Comp Sheet: Line, Floor, and Renovation Tier

If you are pricing a sale or evaluating an offer at The Bristol, the building-wide average is close to useless on its own. What actually moves the number:

• Exposure and line. Corner residences with unobstructed Intracoastal and Atlantic frontage, like Unit 1401, trade at a different tier than interior or city-facing lines in the same stack.
• Renovation status. Original 2019 spec finishes are not the same product as a fully custom rebuild. Unit 1801's Shapiro Pertnoy interior is a different asset than an as-delivered unit two floors down. Back in 2023, Curry's own transactions at the tower had already pushed the price-per-square-foot record to $4,100, with one custom unit asking $4,626 per square foot, and by 2025 another of her sales had reset the building's per-square-foot record again. Those figures sit well above this year's trailing building-wide average of $2,484 per square foot, and the gap is the renovation premium at work, not a sign of broad appreciation.
• Floor plan scale. Base residences start near 4,358 square feet, while Penthouse South layouts run close to 9,231 square feet. A single penthouse closing pulls the building's average price upward in a way that says nothing about what a standard three-bedroom residence would fetch.
• Time on market as a baseline, not a red flag. An average of 389-plus days on market across recent closings means a listing sitting for a year is not automatically overpriced. At this scale, it may just be normal.
• Real negotiation room. A 79% list-to-sell ratio, and Unit 1801's own 17 percent discount from its original ask, show that even a scarce, in-demand tower does not mean asking price is the floor.

What This Means If You're Pricing a Sale or an Offer

The mistake is treating a portal's median or average as if it were a comparable sale. It is not. It is a snapshot of whichever handful of units happen to be listed or sold in a given window, in a building where that handful is small enough to be dominated by outliers. The useful exercise is narrower: find the two or three residences that actually match your line, floor, and finish level, and price against those, not against a citywide or building-wide figure that could shift by a third simply because a different unit came to market.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does a falling median list price mean The Bristol is losing value? Not on its own. With only a handful of units ever listed at once, the median reflects whichever specific residences happen to be active that month. A drop from $23.2 million to $15.5 million between June 2025 and June 2026 is more consistent with a change in which units were listed than with a broad repricing of the building.

How long should I expect to market a residence here? Recent trailing-year data puts the average above 389 days. A slower runway is typical at this price point and this level of scarcity, and it should factor into how a seller thinks about timing rather than being read as a warning sign.

Is price per square foot from a portal a reliable number to anchor to? Only as a starting point. The building-wide average blends original-spec residences with fully custom rebuilds like Unit 1801, and the record-setting price-per-square-foot sales tend to come from that custom tier, not from a typical unit.

If you are weighing a sale at The Bristol, or trying to figure out what a specific line or floor is actually worth against the comps that matter, that is a conversation best had with someone who has closed the transactions, not read the averages. Samantha Curry has represented buyers and sellers in the building's highest-profile closings for six consecutive years. Request a Confidential Market Consultation to get a read on your specific residence, not the building-wide number.