A house at 220 Jungle Road entered the multiple listing service on August 11 with an asking price of $55 million. It sits mid-block, four properties in from the Intracoastal Waterway, on a lot with no ocean frontage and no direct water frontage of any kind. As of August 25, it ranked as the second-most-expensive single-family listing on the entire island of Palm Beach, behind only an oceanfront house built in 2006 that's asking $59.5 million.
If you've been told that water frontage is what separates a $20 million Palm Beach house from a $50 million one, this listing should stop you. It didn't happen by accident, and it isn't a fluke of one seller's ambition. It's a readable signal about what's actually scarce on this island right now, and it changes how you should be pricing anything you're looking at in the Estate Section.
The house that sold before it had a sign
The property has a short, telling history. It was built on speculation by Palm Beach investor Richard True of Cushing Investments, in partnership with Boca Raton-based Courchene Development Corp., led by contractor Paul Courchene. Architect Harold Smith of Smith and Moore Architects designed the Mediterranean-style main house, and the team fully remodeled a 1930s-era garage on the property into a three-car space with a second-floor guest apartment. Combined living space, inside and out, runs to 8,688 square feet on a lot of roughly four-tenths of an acre, a half-mile south of Worth Avenue and about a mile north of Mar-a-Lago.
Here's the detail that matters more than the finishes. The house landed under contract in 2022, before it ever entered the MLS. It changed hands privately for $32 million just as construction wrapped at the end of that December. True wasn't surprised.
"There's no inventory."
That's what he told the Palm Beach Daily News at the time. Nearly four years later, the same logic is playing out again, this time with the property listed by Margit Brandt, who declined to comment on the deal or identify her seller, a trust connected to businessman Paul Everett Gallagher.
Nine listings, six without a drop of water
The MLS snapshot as of late August tells the real story. There were nine active single-family listings on Palm Beach priced between $40 million and $60 million. Six of those nine have no ocean or lake frontage at all. The Jungle Road house is one of them, and it's still priced second highest of all nine, trailing only the oceanfront house on South Ocean Boulevard.
Put another way, more than half of the island's current top tier of listings would fail the simple test most buyers use to sort Palm Beach real estate. If you filtered by water frontage first, you'd eliminate two-thirds of what's actually commanding trophy pricing right now. The filter that matters more is whether a house was built recently, by whom, and whether it can be occupied without a multi-year construction runway.
What the vacant lot down the road already proved
A second transaction from earlier this year makes the same point from a different angle. A 0.84-acre lot at 690 Island Drive, previously home to a 1949 lakefront estate owned by television host Bob Vila and his wife Diana Barrett, sold for $33 million in mid-2025. The house was torn down two months later. The vacant lot, with 175 feet of Intracoastal frontage and a private dock, then resold in June 2026 for $39.2 million, a gain of $6.2 million in a single year with nothing built on it.
That transaction did have water frontage, so it isn't a direct match for the Jungle Road situation. What it shows is the other half of the mechanism. On this island, the ground itself is appreciating independent of anything standing on it. Combine that with the Jungle Road data and you get a fuller picture: buyers are paying for land position and buildability first, water frontage second, and existing structures somewhere further down the list unless those structures are new and well-documented.
The number underneath both stories
Both transactions sit inside a broader county-level trend. In the first quarter of 2026, the median sales price for residential properties in Palm Beach rose 13 percent compared to the same period a year earlier, while inventory fell 17 percent, according to Sotheby's International Realty data reported by The Real Deal. Fewer houses, higher prices, and a growing share of the top tier moving through private channels before it ever reaches a public listing site.
That scarcity is showing up nationally too, not just locally. Coldwell Banker's 2026 mid-year report found land searches climbing 97 percent year over year, with queries for one-of-a-kind properties, including estates and private compounds, up 146 percent. Palm Beach isn't an outlier in that trend. It's one of the tightest expressions of it, because the island's 4.2 square miles have been fully built out for a century and cannot expand.
What this changes if you're comparing homes in the Estate Section
If you're evaluating properties in this part of the island, the water-frontage heuristic will mislead you more often than it helps. A few things worth checking instead:
- Whether the structure is new or recently rebuilt, and whether the permitting, surveys, and approvals are already closed out. A finished build removes years of execution risk that a buyer would otherwise absorb.
- Whether the lot is buildable to current code without a lengthy variance process, regardless of what sits on it today.
- Who built it and whether that team has a track record on the island. Provenance moves faster deals than water views do.
- Whether the property you're comparing against ever appeared publicly at all. A meaningful share of trophy-tier inventory in the Estate Section transacts before it reaches a portal, the way 220 Jungle Road did in 2022. If your search stops at what's listed, you're seeing a partial market.
For sellers holding a dry lot with a strong, recent build, this is the moment to stop discounting against water-view comps that don't actually apply to your buyer pool. For buyers, it means widening the search past "waterfront only" filters, because the inventory that actually competes at the top of this market often looks nothing like what those filters assume.
A few questions worth asking directly
What counts as a "dry lot" in Palm Beach? Any parcel without direct ocean, lake, or Intracoastal frontage. On most of the island this has historically meant a discount. In the Estate Section right now, that discount is much smaller than buyers expect, particularly for new construction.
Does lacking water frontage always mean a lower price? Not currently. The Jungle Road listing prices above every other active listing on the island except one, and that one is oceanfront. The gap between the two is under $5 million.
How much of the top tier is actually visible on the market at any given time? As of late August, nine listings between $40 million and $60 million. Given how 220 Jungle Road traded in 2022, under contract before it reached the MLS, the real number of comparable properties changing hands is higher than what any portal will show you.
If you're weighing a purchase or a sale in Palm Beach's Estate Section and want a read on what's actually moving, including what hasn't reached the public market yet, Christopher B. Scott works this corridor directly. Request an Introduction to talk through where your specific situation fits inside this pricing structure.
