Indian Creek, a man-made island near Miami with only 41 properties, has an impressive roster of wealthy and high-profile residents—and is about to add another.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images
An empty lot on Indian Creek Island, Miami-Dade County’s “billionaire bunker,” sold on Monday for $105 million, a record price for a property on the island. The seller is Mikhail Peleg, a German developer and investor living in Switzerland who “exclusively buys top-tier real estate at the highest prices,” according to Ilya Reznik, the broker who represented him in the deal. Reznik declined to share details about the buyer, citing a non-disclosure agreement.
“Strategically, it’s the best piece of land in Miami,” says Reznik, noting that the lot faces Biscayne Bay, to the west. “It’s a new opportunity for somebody to create a really beautiful mansion,” on what he claims is Miami’s “most secure island.”
The exorbitant price for the property can in part be chalked up to the fact that the lot sits on an exclusive island that is home to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, and retired NFL star Tom Brady, among other high-profile residents. In fact, it borders two of Bezos’ similarly sized properties, which he purchased for $68 million and $79 million, respectively, in 2023.
Six months ago, the seller put the 1.84-acre lot on the market for an even bigger sum: $200 million. Although it sold for much lower than that, the $105 million deal is still extremely expensive—and beat out the island’s previous sale record of $87 million, which Bezos paid in May 2024 when he bought a third property on the island to live in while renovating the first two.
Peleg, the German investor, initially bought the lot with the intention of building a home there, but decided to sell because he no longer planned to come to the U.S., according to Reznik. The dramatic runup in prices on Indian Creek also influenced his decision. “My client figured now’s the right time to sell the property,” the seller’s lawyer Daniel Rudoy told Forbes in January. “He’s a savvy investor.”
On the first day the lot was listed back in January, potential buyers put in a couple of offers around $100 million, according to Reznik. Those offers were met with no response in the hopes of something even higher. As of January 6, six or seven potential buyers had seen the property, with additional offers expected to come in “very soon,” Rudoy told Forbes at the time.
As the sale process progressed, though, offers close to the original, attention-grabbing $200 million did not materialize. “Even if you want more, but nobody pays, it’s not gonna happen. But I think it’s one of the most expensive lots ever sold in Miami,” Reznik says. Peleg’s lawyer Rudoy described it as a “heavily-negotiated transaction.”
The $105 million deal—nearly four times the $27.5 million Peleg paid for the property in 2018—was paid in cash, according to Reznik. In 2023, Peleg took out a $20 million mortgage on the property; the loan was refinanced and expanded last December to $41 million and transferred to an entity connected to British billionaires David and Simon Reuben. A representative for the Reubens declined to comment. (SMM Sunny Holdings, an LLC that lists Mikhail and Marina Peleg as authorized agents and two Belize-based companies as shareholders, owned the property and its related loans.)
Other factors that make Indian Creek so attractive to buyers are its security and privacy. The island has its own police force and is patrolled by sea and air. “It’s like a fortress,” says Rudoy.
Compared to the national average for luxury real estate, where prices have increased by close to 50% over the past four years, per Realtor.com, Indian Creek homes went from selling for single-digit millions in the early 2000s to an average of $30 million in the 2010s to Bezos’ $87 million purchase last year. The latest sale is likely to drive prices up even further and create a new floor for what land on Indian Creek island can sell for, according to Reznik and Dina Goldentayer, a real estate agent at Douglas Elliman who specializes in the Indian Creek area. “Anyone with a house is going to say that they want more [money] because just their land is worth that,” Goldentayer says.
Goldentayer declined to comment on specific properties or owners, but told Forbes in January that buyers “call saying, I want to get on Indian Creek. What do I have to pay to get something actionable?”
