It's spring break time in Fort Lauderdale, and thousands of college students and their friends will be heading to the Florida beach town. Their parents might also visit and buy one of the city's multi-million-dollar condos. The South Florida luxury condo boom is featured this week at TopTenRealEstateDeals.com.
POMPANO BEACH, Fla., March 12, 2025 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ --
It's that time of year again. Winter is almost over, and college students are thinking about which beach town to go for their spring break. Many will choose Fort Lauderdale, the original spring break town that began back in the 1950s when northern colleges sent their swim teams there to train and compete in the city's Olympic-size pool. It wasn't long before the news of the town's beautiful beaches, warm weather, and affordable hotel prices spread to the rest of the cold states' college students.
After the 1960 hit movie "Where the Boys Are," about four pretty coeds who spend their event-filled spring break in Fort Lauderdale, the beach town became the #1 springtime destination for thousands of beer-drinking and hotel-packing college students. Florida's liberal rules on alcohol availability at age 18 (until 1986) sent the partying into overdrive. By the 1980s, over 300,000 students and their friends were making the annual spring trip to Fort Lauderdale.
By the 1990s, Fort Lauderdale's city leaders had started to transition away from its party town reputation to attract a more sophisticated and wealthy crowd, cracking down on the college student parties, the overpacked hotel rooms, and sleeping on the beach. While college students are still welcome, the days and nights of wet tee-shirt contests and public drunkenness are mostly over. Today, Fort Lauderdale has become one of Florida's most glamorous beach towns. Instead of rowdy partiers, the city is now attracting an older-and-affluent crowd who are buying many of the new oceanfront condos. And with over 300 miles of ocean, canals, and rivers, and more affordable land than Miami Beach and Naples, much of South Florida's waterfront condo construction has moved to the Fort Lauderdale area.
At the northern end of the Fort Lauderdale Strip, the town's primary vacation area, Howard Johnson's was one of the state's most popular spring break hotels from 1958 until it closed in 2005 and remained vacant for years. A fond memory for aging baby boomers, the hotel was demolished in 2014 to make way for the Strip's first new oceanfront condo project in over a decade. Since then, upscale Fort Lauderdale oceanfront condos, including Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton, and Auberge, have been built with starting prices over two million dollars for the best ocean views.
Even more of a change, Pompano Beach, Fort Lauderdale's next-door neighbor, was a sleepy beach town for years but is now the area's hot spot for oceanfront condo developers. The new Pompano Beach condo developments that began in 2008 with the construction of the Plaza at Oceanside and Sonata buildings have now entered the highest end of the market with Ritz Carlton Residences under construction and Armani Casa and Waldorf Astoria residential projects in pre-construction. A dozen more Pompano Beach condo projects near the ocean are under construction or are in the pipeline.
While the spring surge of college students heading to Fort Lauderdale is not likely to go back to the 1960s-to-'80s levels, those baby boom-era kids are now over or near retirement age, and are the peak target for the developers of the city's multi-million-dollar condo market. While some beach towns, such as Miami Beach, are trying to keep today's spring breakers away with curfews and $100 parking fees, Fort Lauderdale still welcomes them, but city leaders are especially happy to see their parents visit who have the money to buy one of the city's new beach condos.
Visit TopTenRealEstateDeals.com for more real estate news.
Media Contact
Terry Walsh, TopTenRealEstateDeals.com, 954-544-0526, [email protected], https://toptenrealestatedeals.com/condos/location/fort-lauderdale
SOURCE TopTenRealEstateDeals.com
Share this article