In the winter, when the well-to-do from all over the Northeast visit Florida for charity balls, the board hosts dinners and parties for prospective relocators and local captains of industry. Last year, Smallridge and company sponsored a soiree aboard a $70 million yacht that featured Veuve Clicquot, caviar and live jazz. Guests—who included the CEOs of a national IT company, a major finance company and a land developer, venture capitalists, hedge fund managers and the creator of Goldman Sachs’ prime brokerage division—took private tours with the captain of the yacht.
Smallridge is also working with former hedge fund CIO Dr. Rainford Knight to develop a club for local investment managers called SocialAlpha that encourages bankers in Palm Beach County’s ritzy social scene to get to know each other. Even Florida governor Rick Scott has gotten involved, sending personal letters to friends and prospects from the Northeast (the governor is a former Greenwich resident and businessman) to convince them of Florida’s merits.
Smallridge and Governor Scott are hoping to induce a snowball effect, and so far, it seems to be working. Every financier who moves south chips away at the primary reason to remain near New York City—the fact that everyone else is there. That’s not to say it’s been easy. Florida is still Florida, and popular opinion has not been kind. Even Palm Beach, which has for the most part dodged the insults hurled at the rest of the state, is known for its residents’ apocalyptically bad driving and worse Hawaiian shirts.
“There was a fair amount of trepidation,” says Al Rabil ITI, managing partner and CEO of Kayne Anderson Real Estate Advisors, who made the move from Armonk, New York, with 20 coworkers this summer. “But once everybody got past the stereotypes and actually came and looked, that changed.” He says most of his employees weren’t looking for bottle service and models anyway. The majority of those who have reached the upper echelons of financial management are married with children, and the appeal of a semi-tropical paradise with luxury restaurants, year-round recreation, and sophisticated socializing in a community far more tight-knit than Manhattan (yes, that’sDonald Trump over there) is not lost on them.
Porter’s tour of Billionaire’s Row was part of a modified version of one of the Business Development Board’s red-carpet tours that I took as part of researching this story. I ate breakfast at the clubby Top of the Point restaurant with some of the area’s prominent financiers. A waiter in a captain’s outfit served lobster rolls while a CPA, a lawyer and the executive
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