A buyer we spoke with recently had two listings for the same building open in separate tabs. Both were at Royal Palm Residences in downtown Boca Raton. Both were being pitched by different agents as fairly priced. And the price per square foot on one was nearly 50 percent higher than the other.
That is not a typo, and it is not a case of one agent padding a number. It is what happens when a boutique building with unusually large terraces starts generating its first handful of resales, and every source quoting a per-square-foot figure is quietly making a different choice about what counts as a square foot.
If you are shopping downtown Boca's newest condo towers, this is worth understanding before you let any single psf figure anchor your sense of value.
The same building, two different numbers
Royal Palm Residences is a 48-unit development built across three nine-story towers on East Royal Palm Road, developed by Group P6 under principals Ignacio Diaz and Jose Padua. It sold out entirely at its 2024 launch. Every one of its 48 residences, including six penthouses and four ground-level villas, found a buyer before the building opened.
That means the resale market here is brand new. The first wave of arm's-length resales only started closing within the past year, and the psf figures circulating span a wide range depending on which window you catch. One tracking window covering the twelve months ending July 2026 put recent resale activity at $768 per square foot. A separate industry snapshot around the same time showed active listings in the building averaging near $972 per square foot. A listing active as of May 2026, by contrast, priced a 2,706-square-foot unit at $3,500,000, which works out to $1,293 per square foot on interior living space alone.
Same building. Same downtown corridor. A gap wide enough to change your entire read of what this address costs.
What "total area" actually means here
The explanation is not mysterious once you see the underlying numbers. That May 2026 listing has 2,706 square feet of interior living space and a 1,587-square-foot terrace, for a combined total area of 4,048 square feet. Divide the price by living area alone and you get $1,293 per square foot. Divide the same price by total area, terrace included, and you get roughly $865 per square foot, landing right in the range other sources have quoted for the building's recent activity.
That is not two different markets. It is one price, divided by two different denominators.
Most condo towers in Boca Raton don't create this problem because their terraces are modest, ten or twenty percent of interior space at most. Royal Palm Residences is built differently. Terraces here run from 165 square feet on the smaller units up to more than 2,000 square feet on the largest, in some cases nearly matching the interior footprint. When a terrace is that large relative to the living area, the choice of denominator stops being a rounding difference and starts being the whole story.
At Royal Palm Residences, the terrace is often big enough to move the psf figure by a third depending on how it's counted.
If you are cross-shopping listings here, or comparing this building to a neighbor with smaller outdoor space, ask which square footage is being used before you compare numbers side by side. A building with big terraces will always look artificially cheap on a total-area basis and artificially expensive on a living-area basis, relative to a building with small ones, even if the actual value delivered is identical.
A comp set with almost no comps
The measurement issue is compounded by a second problem: there simply isn't much data yet. The building delivered in early 2024 after selling out completely at launch, and real secondary-market activity has only picked up within the past year. Any "average" psf figure you see quoted right now is being built from a handful of closings, not the dozens or hundreds a more established building would have behind it.
That matters because small samples swing hard. One unit that closes with an unusually large terrace, or one villa sale (there are only four villas in the entire building), can move a reported average significantly in either direction. A single outlier in a data set of five or seven transactions carries far more weight than the same outlier would in a data set of fifty.
This is worth keeping in mind anytime you see a psf figure attached to a newly delivered building anywhere in Boca Raton, not just this one. The number is real, but the confidence you should place in it should scale with how many closed sales stand behind it.
How Royal Palm Residences compares to its downtown neighbors
Buyers weighing Royal Palm Residences are typically also looking at a short list of other new or newer boutique towers in the same downtown corridor. Here is how the comparison set breaks down, and what actually differs beyond the headline psf number.
| Building | Scale | Status | What matters for comparison |
|---|---|---|---|
| Royal Palm Residences | 48 units, three towers | Sold out at 2024 launch; first resales now trading | Large terraces make psf figures highly dependent on how square footage is measured |
| Alina Residences | Larger, multi-tower | Delivered, occupied | Headline psf can look similar, but you're buying into a bigger, more amenity-dense building |
| Tower 155 | 150 units | Delivered, occupied | More supply keeps entry pricing lower, often in the $900 to $1,100 per square foot range |
| Glass House Boca Raton | Boutique scale | Delivery not expected until 2027 | No resale data exists yet, effectively where Royal Palm Residences stood a year ago |
| Mandarin Oriental Residences | Branded luxury | Delivered, occupied | Hotel-branded services come with meaningfully higher monthly carrying costs |
The pattern that stands out is not which building is "best." It is that each one solves a different problem for a different buyer, and the psf headline tells you almost nothing about which problem you're solving until you know what's baked into that number.
Three questions to ask before you trust a psf number
Before you let a quoted price per square foot shape your offer, or your sense of whether a listing is priced fairly, it helps to ask a short set of questions.
- Is this figure calculated on living area, total area, or something else, and does that match how the comparison building's figure was calculated?
- How many closed sales is this average built from, and how recently did they close?
- If the building is still delivering or recently sold out, is there enough resale history yet to trust a benchmark at all?
None of these questions require special access. They just require asking the agent presenting the number to show their math, the same way you'd ask to see the underlying comps behind any appraisal.
Common questions
Why did Royal Palm Residences have no resale market until now? The building sold out completely at its 2024 launch. Every unit went to an original buyer before the towers opened, which meant there was no secondary market for the first year or more. The resales now appearing on the market represent some of the first true arm's-length transactions the building has ever produced.
Should I trust a low psf quote as a sign of good value? Not without checking the denominator first. At this building specifically, a low psf figure often reflects total area including a large terrace rather than a genuinely lower price for living space. Compare living-area psf to living-area psf, and total-area psf to total-area psf, never one against the other.
Buying into a building with this little resale history rewards a careful reading of the actual numbers behind any listing, not the headline figure attached to it. If you're comparing Royal Palm Residences against its downtown neighbors and want someone to walk through the real math on a specific unit, Pink Palm Group can schedule a private consultation and pull the comparison apart line by line.
