The hot new commute for Miami billionaires costs $1,000 a minute

• From Mark Zuckerberg to Alex Karp, the world's richest people are spending big on waterfront properties in Miami.
• A new status symbol is helping them beat traffic — for a price.
• ILandMiami offers mobile helipads that travel the waterways so billionaires can land near their own backyards.

Time is money, as the saying goes.

For real estate agent Angel Nicolas' clientele, who are spending eight figures on homes in South Florida, time is a lot of money.

So when a recent buyer wanted to tour homes in Palm Beach, Miami, and the Florida Keys, he knew a car or the Brightline wouldn't do. Instead, they traveled by helicopter, landing on a floating helipad off the coast of Miami.

"It's an expensive thing, but time is the most valuable thing to them," Nicolas told Business Insider of his clientele.

With Miami traffic worse than ever — in 2024, the average commuter in the city spent 93 hours in traffic, according to a 2025 report from Texas A&M's Transportation Institute — the ultrawealthy are looking for ways to save their precious minutes.

ILandMiami is offering a new solution that's becoming a hot commodity among Miami's new billionaire class. No longer do they have to spend an hour traveling to or from Miami's private airports to their homes on Indian Creek or Fisher Island. Instead, those who can afford it can take a five or six-minute helicopter ride to the water off their own backyard.

The company, a first of its kind in Miami, provides aquatic, mobile helipads in the city. The cost? About $1,000 per minute — helicopter not included.

"I realized how much money is here and how many properties are on the water and how many people could potentially use the service due to the traffic and the way Miami was growing," Adam Terris, ILandMiami's CEO, told Business Insider. "We had some billionaires calling us, and then the wheel started to turn."

It took years for ILandMiami, founded in 2016, to launch its marine utility vehicles, MUVs for short, due to the complexities of building something that could handle large commercial helicopters and obtain Coast Guard certification.

The service launched in January of last year, in time for the new influx of billionaires.

In recent months, several of the world's wealthiest people, including Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, have spent tens of millions of dollars on waterfront properties in Miami. The helipads have been spotted off the coast of Indian Creek, where Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos own homes, as well as expensive hotels like the Fontainebleau.

While Terris declined to mention specific customers, citing NDAs, he said that several have name recognition. They are the kind of people, he said, that would typically land their helicopters directly on their superyachts — but those yachts are too big to fit in Miami's waterways.

"We've seen the kind of customers that are coming here — the superstars, the financial icons of the world — they want privacy, they want security, they want to come and go without everybody knowing they're here," Nancy Batchelor, a luxury real estate agent in Compass, told Business Insider. "Some of the big names that have moved here, I know they're using it."

Getting on a billionaire's radar

ILandMiami is relatively small, but growing.

Terris said the company hosts around 20 flights a month, 95% of which are for individuals seeking a landing pad for a personal or chartered helicopter. It takes three or four minutes for the aircraft to land and for passengers to disembark and board the boat that will take them to solid ground. Use of the platform for one landing costs between $4,000 to $4,500.

Batchelor, whose high-net-worth clients are the type to be short on time but have ample money to fly private, recently featured an ILandMiami helipad in a promotional video for a $15 million home on Miami's exclusive La Gorce Island set to Fergie's song "Glamorous." Many prospective buyers own multiple homes, she said, and an easy and quick way in and out would appeal to them.

Marketing to the billionaire set isn't easy, but luxury agents, including Batchelor, said that word is getting out.

"You can't reach out to billionaires," Terris said. He said the business is primarily referral-based and that he's hoping to grow it to include more people who want the experience — a scenic tour of Miami for an anniversary or proposal, for example — as well as the ultrarich.

"We are showcasing what the lifestyle would look like," Alvaro Núñez, the founder of Miami real estate marketing firm Super Luxury Group, which has partnered with ILandMiami, told Business Insider.

More business may be on the horizon.

Last month, several companies received approval to test Jetson-like flying taxis — formally known as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft — in Miami.

Terris sees any increase in Miami air traffic as a potential business opportunity: more air traffic, more people in need of his landing pads.

And as for regular traffic. That's not going anywhere.

"I don't know if the city planners realized how popular Miami was going to be," Batchelor said. "And we're not known for our best drivers."