In 2021, spec builder Stuart Hankin paid $3.4 million for a one acre lot on Bear's Club Drive. He finished the six bedroom house last year, with eight full baths, two half baths, a theater, and a 1,600 bottle wine cellar, and listed it in 2024 asking $30 million. The price climbed three times over the next two years. By this spring it was asking $39 million. It closed in mid-July for $33,767,000, a gap of roughly 13 percent between final ask and final sale, according to The Real Deal's tracking of Palm Beach County luxury contracts.
That single closing is now part of whatever "average price" or "median price" a listing site assigns to The Bear's Club this quarter. One house. And in a community with a fixed, tiny inventory, one house can carry more weight than most buyers assume when they see a headline number attached to the neighborhood.
A Market Too Small to Average
The Bear's Club was built out between 2001 and 2016, and it stopped there. Different sources describe the total count slightly differently, some put it at 96 homes across estate residences, golf villas, and club villas, others put it closer to 100. That small disagreement is itself telling. When a community only produces a handful of closed sales in a given year, there isn't enough public transaction volume for anyone to reconcile the count with confidence, let alone the pricing.
A median works when there are enough data points to smooth out the outliers. The Bear's Club rarely has enough closings in a year for that smoothing to happen. A single $30 million estate and a single $3 million golf villa resale can sit in the same trailing 12 month window and produce a number that describes neither property.
A median needs a crowd. The Bear's Club has fewer than 100 houses and, in most years, a handful of closings. That's not a market curve. That's a coin flip.
The Same Twelve Months, Two Different Bear's Clubs
While the Hankin house was closing at $33.8 million, another estate a few doors down told a completely different story. A home under construction at 215 Bear's Club Drive came to market this spring asking $47.9 million, well over a year from completion at the time, with a finish date slated for late summer 2027. At 15,075 square feet, that listing priced out to $3,177 a square foot, a figure disclosed directly in the listing itself.
Two homes, same gated community, same calendar year, more than $14 million apart in asking price, and neither one represents what a typical buyer should expect to pay for "a house in Bear's Club." Averaging them, or worse, blending them with a resale villa from a decade earlier, is exactly what a portal-generated median does every time it recalculates.
A New Kind of Comp Just Showed Up
Since the club's founding in 1999, every home inside the gates has been either a standalone estate, a golf villa, or a club villa. That changed this year with the announcement of The Residences at The Bear's Club, a six unit condominium enclave built directly adjacent to the clubhouse with views of the ninth hole on the Nicklaus signature course. The project is designed by Peacock and Lewis and built by Affinity Construction Group, and it marks the first attached living product ever offered inside the community.
One of the six units has listed near $7.4 million for just over 5,000 square feet of living space, which works out to roughly $1,477 a square foot, a very different price basis than the $3,177 a square foot estate under construction on Bear's Club Drive. Once these six units close, they will establish the first ever local price per square foot benchmark for condominium ownership in The Bear's Club. That sounds like it should help buyers. In the short term, it does the opposite.
Six sales do not create a bigger sample. They create a brand new, untested category dropped into an already thin comp pool. For at least a year or two, appraisers pricing a Bear's Club condo will have no local closed sales of the same product type to lean on, only estate and villa data that describes a different kind of ownership entirely.
What This Means If You're Comparing Clubs
For a buyer cross-shopping The Bear's Club against a larger community where dozens of homes change hands every year, a quoted average carries real statistical weight because there's enough volume behind it. In The Bear's Club, that same number might reflect two closings, or one closing and one still-under-construction ask that never actually traded. The number is real. What it represents is not always what a buyer thinks it represents.
Before you treat any published price for The Bear's Club as a market signal, ask your agent to walk you through:
- The actual closed sales behind the number for the trailing 12 months, not the rolling figure a portal calculates automatically
- What each sale actually was: estate, golf villa, club villa, or now a condo unit, since all four exist in the community for the first time this year
- The gap between final list price and closing price, which on the neighborhood's most recent headline sale ran close to 13 percent
- Whether any comp being shown to you was still under construction when it was priced, since two of the community's largest recent listings were marketed well before a certificate of occupancy existed
The Takeaway
The arrival of the first condominium product in 25 years is genuinely good long-term news for anyone trying to understand pricing in The Bear's Club. It adds a category that current inventory has never had. But it will take a year or two of actual closings before that category produces enough data to mean anything on its own, and in the meantime it sits alongside a market that already struggles to produce a meaningful average from a couple of estate sales a year.
If you're evaluating a home in The Bear's Club, whether you're the one selling the estate that just closed at a discount to its ask, or you're comparing a new condo unit against a resale villa with no shared comp history, the published number is a starting point, not an answer. Getting to the real answer takes someone who can pull the actual closed file behind the headline.
That is the work Opulence Group does for every Jupiter buyer and seller who wants more than a portal's guess. Let's Connect and look at the actual transaction history behind whatever number brought you here.
