Five hundred and seventy-four feet of Biscayne Bay, a pool with a mosaic floor, a seller who kept relisting for five years and a Coral Gables price record that was overtaken before the year was out.
He did not pay the asking price
Abel Tesfaye bought the most expensive house Coral Gables had ever sold, and a good part of the entertainment press promptly gave the wrong price for it. The house had been listed at $54.9m, a number tidy enough to travel, and it did travel, into headlines that had The Weeknd handing over every cent. Listing prices have that quality. They are published early, they look official and they are easy to repeat, while the number agreed at the end of a negotiation arrives later and more quietly, by which time the first version has already done its rounds.
The figure that counts came from The Real Deal on 16 October 2025, when brokers confirmed the sale had closed at $50m. Orlando Weekly put the closing on Friday 10 October, a week after The Real Deal had reported, citing sources, that the Toronto-born singer was in contract on a waterfront house in Gables Estates. The property had gone under contract in September.
The word brokers carries some weight here, because when The Real Deal confirmed the price, the deed had not yet appeared in public records, so the number rests on the people who did the deal rather than on paper filed with Miami-Dade County. The paperwork had simply not caught up with the handshake by the time the headlines were written. It has now: Miami-Dade’s property record for the house shows a $50m sale with a deed dated 7 October 2025, to a trust rather than to a name, which is how such houses are usually held. In South Florida an asking price is an opening remark, and this one drew a polite reply.
Eddy Martinez and Roland Ortiz of One Sotheby’s International Realty held the listing, and Ortiz brought in the buyer. Both declined to comment on who was buying or who was selling. That is the form at this end of the market, and it leaves the question of whose name sits on the title to the county’s own records, which in time will say what the agents would not.
A point lot with the bay on three sides
The shape of the land is the place to start. The house stands on a point lot at the tip of a V-shaped peninsula reaching into Biscayne Bay, which means the water is not a view so much as a neighbour on more than one side. A peninsula has only one tip, and every other house along it must look past somebody else’s lawn or somebody else’s dock to find the open bay. Most of Miami pays handsomely for a glimpse of the bay. This plot has the bay wrapped around it.
The house itself was built in 2018 and runs to nearly 19,000 square feet, with eight bedrooms. That sounds like a great deal of house until it is set against that much water, at which point it looks about right. It is new enough that nobody need feel obliged to gut it, and old enough to have already changed hands twice.
Outside there is a hot tub, an outdoor kitchen and a dock. The pool is 62 feet long with a mosaic bottom, the sort of detail best appreciated from an upstairs window or from the deck of a boat coming in. A mosaic at the bottom of a pool is a private pleasure, visible only when the water is still and the light is right, which suits a house whose owner has said nothing about it at all. There is also a five-car garage, which on a house whose finest entrance is from the water feels faintly old-fashioned, like a coat of arms carved over the service door.
Inside, a grand bifurcated staircase splits on its way up, sparing whoever lives there the trouble of choosing a wing before reaching the landing. If one feature of the house gets repeated over dinner, it will be that staircase, because it is the one thing in the listing photographs that no amount of bay can upstage.
A seller who waited five years
The seller was Steven Lempera, whom The Real Deal describes as an oil recycling mogul. He bought the house at auction in 2019 for $25.5m, when it was barely a year old, which is an unusual moment to find a house of this size going under the hammer, and a fortunate one for whoever happens to be bidding.
He put it on the market in 2020 at $49.9m. Then began a five-year routine of taking it off and putting it back on at varying prices, a rhythm familiar to anyone who has watched a very large house wait for a very particular buyer. Each return to the market reminded the people who keep track of such things that the point lot was still available, and each withdrawal suggested a seller in no hurry to accept less than he had in mind. It came back in June 2025 at the asking price that would later fill the headlines, and by September it was under contract.
The buyer, when he arrived, was exactly the kind the house had been waiting for. The Real Deal’s sources said Tesfaye had been in the market for a waterfront mansion in that price range and in that neighbourhood, which is a short list of houses and a shorter list of people. Houses of this kind are rarely sold in the ordinary sense. At this altitude the market is a guest list, and a seller’s job is to wait until the right name turns up.
A record that lasted until New Year’s Eve
It no longer is, although for a few weeks it held the title outright.
Before Tesfaye, the Coral Gables record belonged to the 2022 sale of 650 Casuarina Concourse for $45.3m. His purchase cleared that comfortably, and the October headlines duly announced a new high-water mark for the city. The Casuarina record had stood for the better part of three years, long enough to become the number that brokers quoted whenever a big listing came up in the enclave.
On 31 December 2025, The Real Deal reported that the developer Alex Pirez had sold 340 Leucadendra Drive, also in Gables Estates, for $55m, overtaking the Arvida Parkway sale. The record therefore lasted from mid-October to New Year’s Eve, which in chart terms is a respectable run at number one and a reminder that, in this enclave, the next big sale is usually already in someone’s diary.
The new holder sits inside the same gates, a few streets from the house it displaced. Gables Estates, it turns out, mostly breaks its own records.
Gables Estates, the dearest gates in America
It is a gated enclave on the bay at the southern end of Coral Gables, and it has lately been keeping very expensive company. Zillow’s ranking, reported by The Real Deal, had recently put Gables Estates ahead of Beverly Hills as the most expensive neighbourhood in the United States. For a buyer who already owns in Los Angeles, that is a pointed comparison, and one that would have been hard to imagine being made in Miami’s favour a generation ago.
The neighbours are not strangers to the music business. Miami New Times reported that Pharrell Williams, a longtime collaborator of Tesfaye’s, bought a $30m estate in Gables Estates in 2020. Five years later, a man who has spent much of his career in studios with Williams bought within the same gates, which gives the enclave the faint air of a recording session that has spilled out onto the water.
Closer still, Dr Nicole Martin, formerly of “The Real Housewives of Miami”, and her husband bought 33 Arvida Parkway for $34m in late August 2025, weeks before Tesfaye’s own contract on the same parkway. In the space of a single season, one street in one gated neighbourhood absorbed two of the biggest residential sales in the county’s recent memory.
What all of them are buying is the water. A house can be torn down, rebuilt or remodelled by the next owner with stronger opinions about staircases, while the frontage stays exactly where it is. Nobody is making any more Biscayne Bay, which is why a dock here behaves like an heirloom long before anyone has had the chance to inherit it.
Nobody has reported him moving in
Nobody has reported him moving in. The reporting describes a purchase, and the purchase alone: the house has not been described as his home, his Florida base or his winter address, and whether it is a residence or a holding on the bay has not been said.
What is on the record is the shape of his property life. The Real Deal called this his first publicly known real estate purchase in South Florida. His other known big purchase came in 2021, when he bought a mansion in Bel Air for $70m. A singer from Toronto with a house in the hills above Los Angeles now also owns a point of land on the opposite coast, facing a bay that opens onto the Atlantic. The two houses could hardly be less alike in setting, one looking down over a city from its hillside and the other looking out across open water at sea level.
The timing has a certain neatness. In August 2025, The Weeknd played a sold-out show at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens. By September, a house on Arvida Parkway was under contract; by 10 October, the sale had closed. The calendar invites a story, and the reporting stops short of telling one. So does this page.
Whatever he decides to do with it, the house is built for arrivals from the water, with a pool sized for the long view and a staircase for making an entrance. Lempera waited five years for the right buyer, and in the end it was Ortiz who found him.
The dock, at least, is ready.
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Cover: photograph Pedro Mora via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0), cut-out; illustration, DDW.
