About 65 percent of international buyers in South Florida closed after two visits or fewer, and 11 percent bought without setting foot in the state at all, according to the international report MIAMI REALTORS published in January 2026 covering the 2025 year. A purchase of that size, decided on that little first-hand information, is not really a decision about a building. It is a decision about a person.
Eric McNeil’s work sits at that intersection. He maintains relationships with luxury developers across the Miami, Boca Raton and Palm Beach corridor while drawing on a broader network spanning professional sports, entertainment, business and private capital. Many of those relationships were built long before they intersected with real estate, creating a global network that increasingly connects back to opportunities in South Florida.
What transfers between industries, and what does not
The honest version of that story includes the part where the relationship stops being useful. A connection formed in a locker room, a green room or a boardroom in another country converts into exactly one thing: the other person’s willingness to take the call and to believe the answer. It buys attention. It does not buy competence, and a buyer who mistakes one for the other is going to have an expensive year.
Nothing about pricing transfers. Neither does any feel for which developer’s stated delivery dates hold, or what happens to a water view when the parcel two lots north changes hands. That knowledge is local, it is learned by being present, and a person who knows half of Los Angeles by name arrives in Sunny Isles without it.
A second failure gets less attention. An introduction made without any filtering costs a developer’s sales team real hours, and it costs the introducer standing on every call afterwards. Someone who forwards names indiscriminately teaches the people receiving them to discount everything he sends. McNeil’s position is that a cross-industry relationship earns its value through what it lets him decline to pass on.
Three counties that a foreign buyer usually treats as one
The regional figures give the first conversation its shape. MIAMI REALTORS reported roughly $4.4 billion of international residential purchases across South Florida in 2025, up from $3.1 billion the year before and covering about 5,300 properties, and put foreign buyers at around 15 percent of the region’s residential dollar volume against roughly 2 percent nationally. Colombia supplied the largest share of those buyers, Argentina the second, with Mexico and Brazil next.
What a practitioner notices is the distribution inside the region rather than the total. Of that reported volume, Miami-Dade accounted for around $3.2 billion, Broward for $785 million and Palm Beach County for $123 million. The corridor is one drive on a map and three different markets in the data, and a buyer in Madrid or Bogota who has decided he wants Florida almost never arrives knowing which of the three he means.
The distinction between South Florida’s submarkets is important because international interest in the region does not translate uniformly across Miami, Boca Raton and Palm Beach. Brickell and Edgewater offer dense, vertical development near Miami’s urban core, while Boca Raton and Palm Beach reflect different residential, lifestyle and development patterns. Understanding those differences is part of understanding the corridor rather than treating South Florida as a single luxury market.
The reported preferences add another layer. Around 51 percent of South Florida’s international buyers chose a condominium in 2025, against about 15 percent of buyers nationally, and about the same share paid cash. For McNeil, those broader trends provide context, but individual projects and submarkets still require their own evaluation.
Where a foreign buyer’s diligence stops resembling a domestic one
The paperwork diverges early, and an unfamiliar buyer tends to find out late. The largest divergence sits at the exit rather than the entry. Under section 1445 of the Internal Revenue Code, a buyer acquiring a US real property interest from a foreign person must generally withhold 15 percent of the amount realised on the sale, which is a share of the price rather than a share of the gain. There is an exception where the amount realised does not exceed $300,000 and the buyer takes the property as a residence, and a foreign seller can apply on Form 8288-B for a withholding certificate reducing or eliminating the amount, with the IRS ordinarily acting within 90 days of a complete application. None of that is fatal. It does mean the disposal has a cash flow shape best understood at purchase rather than discovered at listing.
Presence is the other quiet one. The substantial presence test treats a person as a US tax resident if they are in the country at least 31 days in the current year and reach 183 on a weighted count of days in the current year, plus a third of the prior year, plus a sixth of the year before that. A buyer who spends four winter months in Palm Beach every year can cross the line in the third year without having changed a single habit.
Closings run on a different clock as well. A buyer who cannot attend signs through a power of attorney, and a document executed abroad usually has to be notarised at a US consulate or carry an apostille under the 1961 Hague Convention, which takes weeks rather than days. Financing follows the same pattern, since a buyer with no US credit file is generally looking at foreign national programmes from portfolio lenders on much larger deposits than a domestic borrower would post.
One item is genuinely unsettled. The Treasury Department’s residential real estate reporting rule took effect on 1 March 2026, requiring closing professionals to report non-financed transfers of residential property to legal entities and trusts, including the individuals behind them at a 25 percent ownership threshold. On 19 March 2026 the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas vacated the rule nationwide in Flowers Title Companies LLC v. Bessent, the Justice Department appealed to the Fifth Circuit, and FinCEN has stated that reporting persons are not required to file while that order stands. A buyer purchasing through an entity in 2026 is working inside a requirement that lasted 18 days and may come back on appeal, which is worth knowing before a closing date is fixed.
Why global relationships still depend on local expertise
Cross-border real estate transactions can involve legal, tax, financing and brokerage considerations that vary based on the parties and the structure of the transaction. Those matters are handled by the appropriate licensed professionals, while McNeil’s role remains centered on relationships, strategic introductions and his knowledge of the South Florida development market. A global network can create a connection to an opportunity, but local expertise remains essential once that interest reaches Florida.
The relationships run in both directions. South Florida developers increasingly operate in a global market, while athletes, entertainers, business leaders and other private-market participants around the world continue to look toward Florida. McNeil’s role through McNeilX is to build strategic connections where those networks meaningfully intersect, drawing on relationships developed across real estate, sport, entertainment, business and capital.
For McNeil, the value of a global network is not measured by the number of introductions it can produce. It is built through selectivity, credibility and long-term relationships. Bringing those relationships home to Florida means connecting the right people and opportunities while continuing to build trust with the developers and market participants on both sides.
This article is for informational purposes only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it is not investment, financial, legal or tax advice. Real estate and private market investments carry risk, including loss of principal, and nothing described here is a prediction of future results. Readers should consult their own licensed advisers before making any financial decision.
