Miami Private Islands Compared: Indian Creek vs Star Island vs La Gorce
Indian Creek, Star Island and La Gorce Island are three guard-gated islands near Miami Beach, each selling a different kind of privacy. Indian Creek sells absence: one bridge, its own public safety department, 41 homes per the New York Post. Star Island sells a recognized address. La Gorce Island sells a gated island you can live on full time.
Who this page is for
If you are weighing a purchase at the top of the Miami market, the choice between these three is not a taste question. It changes who controls the gate, how many neighbors you have, how much of the waterfront is genuinely yours, and how deep the resale pool is when you eventually sell. From a boat the islands look interchangeable: sea walls, docks, big lawns, cameras. The gap between them is large, and most of it has nothing to do with square footage.
What follows is the comparison a buyer should actually run. Access and gating first, then governance, then privacy, then the waterfront itself, then the buyer profile each island attracts. Price comes last on purpose, because price is the output of the other five, not the input.
For where these three sit inside the broader trophy market, including the ferry-served and oceanfront alternatives, start with our Miami market hub.
The three-way comparison
| Buyer question | Indian Creek | Star Island | La Gorce Island |
|---|---|---|---|
| Access and gating | The Surfside Bridge is the sole vehicular connection between the island and the mainland, according to the Village of Indian Creek. Entry across it is controlled. | Reached by land from the MacArthur Causeway. Entry is controlled at a guard gate. | Reached by bridge from the La Gorce mainland neighborhood, with a gate staffed around the clock and patrols on the streets and the surrounding water. |
| Governance | An incorporated village. The Village of Indian Creek runs its own public safety department, and press coverage of the island describes a marine patrol as part of that coverage. | Part of the City of Miami Beach. Security is delivered through the guardhouse plus private details retained by individual owners, not through a dedicated municipal force. | Part of the City of Miami Beach. The La Gorce Island Association, established in 1946, has overseen the island since it took over ownership and maintenance. |
| Privacy in practice | The most structurally protected of the three. Off-market transactions are common, and the island is primarily residential with no retail or commercial district to draw outside traffic. | Private day to day behind walls and hedges, but the address itself is public knowledge and part of what buyers pay for. Visibility is the product. | Quiet rather than fortified. Low public profile, little tourist attention, and neighbors who are mostly there year round. |
| Waterfront character | Home sites are arranged along the eastern, southern and western shorelines of a single island, per the Village, so waterfront is close to universal. Scarcity is absolute. | Large bayfront lots with skyline outlook and direct routing toward Government Cut and open ocean, which matters for deep-draft yacht owners. | A mix of open bayfront, canal-front and interior home sites. You choose how much frontage you pay for. |
| Buyer profile | Billionaires and family offices buying absence. Often a trophy or seasonal compound rather than a primary home. | Recognized names, entertainment and sports wealth, finance principals who want an address people already know. | Established families and executives who want a real neighborhood, with the La Gorce Country Club a short drive away on the mainland. |
| Practical entry point | The highest of the three. The publicly recorded prints on this island now run into nine figures. | The most varied of the three. Publicly reported sales fall into distinct bands: lot-value trades, mid-band houses, and finished trophy estates. | The most accessible of the three, trading well below the levels Indian Creek has publicly recorded. |
Indian Creek: maximum privacy, absolute scarcity
The Village of Indian Creek describes itself as a private residential municipality on a man-made barrier island in Biscayne Bay, spanning roughly 0.46 square miles, which the Village itself states as approximately 294 acres. That figure is worth stating precisely, because secondary sources have circulated island acreage in a wide spread, commonly rounding it up to a flat 300 acres, and the Village's own number is the one to use.
The Village reports that residential home sites are arranged along the eastern, southern and western shorelines, and that a significant portion of the island is occupied by the Indian Creek Country Club, including a clubhouse, golf course and dockage. Municipal facilities, including Village Hall, sit on a separate parcel near the northeastern end of the bridge. The New York Post, reporting on a 2025 land sale there, put the current count at 41 homes.
The golf course was designed by William Flynn. The Village states that the club and the surrounding development were established in the early twentieth century, with architectural contributions by Maurice Fatio in 1929, which is the provenance a trophy buyer is usually asking about when they ask how old the island is. Andrew Green oversaw a full renovation that began construction in January 2022 and reopened the following year, rebuilding greens to USGA specifications and reshaping bunkers toward Flynn's original design intent, according to Golf Course Architecture magazine. The same project installed new drainage and water storage to cope with rising sea levels.
Three structural facts drive the pricing.
The first is the bridge. According to the Village, the Surfside Bridge provides the sole vehicular connection between Indian Creek and the mainland. There is one way on and one way off by car, and it is controlled.
The second is the public safety department. Indian Creek is an incorporated village that runs its own department rather than contracting private guards or relying on a county force. The New York Post has described residents there as secured by their own police force and a marine patrol. That municipal structure is why the island picked up the "Billionaire Bunker" label in the press, and it is why the label stuck.
The third is supply. With 41 homes, per the New York Post, ownership functions less like a house purchase and more like a permanent seat. Two owners rarely decide to sell in the same window. When one does, the transaction often never reaches a public feed. The buyer who waits for a portal listing here waits a long time and usually loses the parcel to someone whose broker was already talking to the owner.
Publicly reported residents include Jeff Bezos, Tom Brady, Carl Icahn, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, per the New York Post. Names are not the reason to buy. They are useful only as evidence of what the peer group is willing to pay for discretion.
On the price side, the public record on this island has moved fast, and the direction is one way. The trajectory starts well before the current set of names. Forbes reported that in August 2012 the estate at 3 Indian Creek, a roughly 30,000 square foot house on a two-acre lot, sold for $47 million in cash after being listed at $60 million and reduced to $52 million, and that the sale was the most expensive in Miami's history at the time. The New York Post reports that Bezos bought two neighboring homes in 2023, at $68 million and $79 million. In June 2025 an undeveloped roughly two-acre parcel at 9 Indian Creek Island Road, adjacent to those holdings, closed at $105 million after being listed at $200 million, which the Post described as a record for the island. Then in March 2026 the ceiling moved again: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan closed on an under-construction estate at 7 Indian Creek Island Road for $170 million, reported by The Real Deal and confirmed by the Miami-Dade property appraiser's office as the most expensive single-folio residential sale in county history.
Read those five numbers together and the picture is clearer than any average would be. The island's public high-water mark went from $47 million in 2012 to $170 million in 2026. This is a market where raw land clears nine figures and an unfinished house sets a county record.
Practical guidance for a buyer at this level: the work is not searching. The work is establishing which owners might engage, whether an adjacent lot could be assembled, and whether the standing house is a hold, a gut renovation or a teardown. Our Indian Creek island page carries the market detail; the acquisition strategy is a private conversation.
Star Island: the recognized address
Star Island is a man-made island in Biscayne Bay, completed in 1922 by the Army Corps of Engineers by dredging sand and originally owned by Miami Beach developer Carl Fisher. It sits just east of Palm and Hibiscus islands and is reached by land from the MacArthur Causeway. Bloomberg ranked it the most expensive neighborhood in the United States in 2023.
That recognition is the asset and the cost.
The asset is resale liquidity. A recognized address widens the buyer pool at the top, and it shortens the explanation a seller has to make. Star Island also pairs large bayfront lots with routing toward Government Cut and the open ocean. If the yacht is central to how the property gets used, that geography is worth real money.
The cost is visibility. The island's celebrity-spotting culture is part of its identity, and it is close enough to the causeway and the cruise channel to be looked at constantly from the water. Walls and hedges are the local convention for a reason, and most owners layer their own security on top of the guardhouse. Day to day, life on Star Island is private. The fact of your ownership generally is not.
That distinction is the whole decision for some buyers. If you want an address people know, Star Island. If you want an address people cannot find, this is not the island.
Star Island prices spread across the widest set of bands of the three because the housing stock is the most varied. A tired house on a good lot trades close to land value; a finished trophy estate trades many multiples higher. The high-water mark is documented: in March 2025 developer Vlad Doronin sold his estate at 26 Star Island Drive for $120 million, a Miami-Dade record at the time, according to The Real Deal. That record has since been passed by the Indian Creek sale above, which tells you something useful about the relationship between the two islands. Detail on the island sits on our Star Island Miami page.
La Gorce Island: the island you can actually live on
One point has to be corrected before anything else, because it is widely repeated and it is wrong. La Gorce Island is not built around the La Gorce Country Club. The island is a separate and much smaller neighborhood, connected by bridge to the main La Gorce neighborhood on Miami Beach, and it is the mainland neighborhood that holds the club and its golf course at 5685 Alton Road. The two are easily confused and constantly conflated. A buyer who believes they are purchasing golf frontage on the island will find that frontage does not exist there.
What the island does offer is proximity. The club is minutes away by car, and for buyers who want club life it is a genuine part of the appeal. It is simply not on the island, and nothing you buy on the island comes with it.
With that established, La Gorce Island is the least performative of the three and, for a certain buyer, the most sensible.
What it offers that the other two do not is normalcy. It functions as a neighborhood, with full-time residents and everyday routines rather than a set of trophy assets sitting dark for much of the year, which is closer to the pattern on Indian Creek and, to a lesser degree, Star Island. For a primary-residence buyer with a family, that lived-in quality is usually what decides it.
The island has been overseen since 1946 by the La Gorce Island Association, which took over ownership and maintenance and still handles the island's security and upkeep. That is a different governance model from both of the others: not a municipality with sworn officers, and not a City of Miami Beach neighborhood leaning on a guardhouse alone.
The second difference is the lot mix. Indian Creek and Star Island are waterfront-by-default, so most purchases carry a premium frontage parcel underneath them whether you value it or not. La Gorce Island gives you a choice: open bayfront, canal-front with dockage, or an interior lot set back from the water. That mix is the most likely reason the island's entry point sits below the other two. You can weight your budget toward the house or toward the water rather than paying for both at once.
Security is genuine but lower key. The gated entrance is guarded around the clock, and a security boat patrols the island's shoreline on a regular basis. La Gorce Island draws far less sightseeing attention than Star Island does. That absence of attention is itself a form of privacy, and it is a different form than Indian Creek's. Indian Creek is private because it is hard to enter. La Gorce Island is private because nobody is looking.
How to actually choose
Strip the names out and the decision comes down to five questions.
How private do you need to be? If the honest answer is total, Indian Creek is the only one of the three that delivers it structurally. If the answer is private but recognized, Star Island. If the answer is secure and normal, La Gorce Island.
Is this a primary home or a trophy? Full-time families lean La Gorce Island. Trophy and seasonal buyers lean Star Island and Indian Creek, where a house sitting empty for months is the neighborhood norm rather than an oddity.
How firm is the budget ceiling? Indian Creek's public record includes a $68 million house in 2023, per the New York Post, and a $170 million estate in 2026, per The Real Deal. A hard ceiling well below those levels removes Indian Creek outright and points you to La Gorce Island or the lower band of Star Island. That is not a downgrade. It is a match.
Water, golf, or both? Indian Creek and Star Island are water-first. Indian Creek happens to have a course in the middle, but you are buying frontage. La Gorce Island lets you trade down on water and stay close to a club, provided you understand the club is on the mainland.
How much does the boat matter? Star Island's position relative to Government Cut and open ocean is the main boating argument in this set. Indian Creek's waterway connects to Biscayne Bay and ultimately the Atlantic through Baker's Haulover Inlet, per the Village. If you run a large vessel, verify air draft, clearances and dockage depth on any specific parcel and along your intended route before you fall in love with the house. Those constraints are parcel-specific and route-specific, and no island-level generalization will settle them for you.
The recurring mistake is shopping by name recognition and then paying a premium for a quality the buyer never actually wanted.
Buyers weighing a gated island against a ferry-served address should also look at Fisher Island, which has no road or causeway connection at all and is reached only by private ferry, yacht or helicopter. The privacy logic there is different again: arrival is controlled by boat rather than by a gate.
Where these islands sit in the wider market
Island buying is one branch of Miami's trophy market. The others are the oceanfront belt in Miami Beach and Surfside, the North Bay Road corridor, and the branded and full-floor condominium tier, which solves for security and lock-and-leave convenience rather than land. A buyer who wants privacy without maintaining acreage often ends up in that last category instead.
If you want the named-sale benchmarks and the current top of the market across all of those categories, our most expensive homes in Miami page is the reference we keep current.
Two closing points of process.
First, public inventory is not the market on any of these three islands. Public listings are a sample, and on Indian Creek they are a very small one. Treat any portal result as partial information and assume the more interesting conversations are happening quietly.
Second, run the diligence in the right order. Zoning and setback constraints, sea wall condition and elevation, dock permitting, insurance posture, and the club membership question all move value more than finishes do. The Village of Indian Creek notes that its waterway is maintained with vertical seawalls along both shorelines, which is a maintenance obligation as much as an amenity. On a rebuild, confirm the permit path with the governing jurisdiction directly, because Indian Creek sets its own rules as a municipality while Star Island and La Gorce Island fall under the City of Miami Beach. Get those timelines in writing from the jurisdiction before you underwrite a construction schedule.
Third, and this is the constraint most often missed on all three islands: the water itself is regulated by the state, not by the city or the village. Florida's Department of Environmental Protection describes the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve as running from the headwaters of the Oleta River south to Card Sound near Key Largo, covering 64,607 acres, and established in 1974. Inside the preserve, Florida Statute 258.397 prohibits dredging and filling except for a defined set of purposes, one of which is the minimum dredging necessary for marinas, piers and docks and their attendant navigation channels. The same statute prohibits seaward relocation of bulkhead lines except where the proposed line sits at the line of mean high water, and it prohibits construction, replacement or relocation of seawalls without approval of the board of trustees, approval the statute says may be granted only if riprap construction is used.
That last clause is the one to read twice. A buyer planning to replace a failing vertical seawall, extend a dock or deepen a slip is not simply pulling a municipal permit. The statutory boundary is drawn across the mouths of artificial waterways rather than up into them, so whether a given parcel's submerged land sits inside the preserve is a parcel-level question with a real answer. Get that answer from the Department before you budget the marine work, not after.
Frequently asked questions
Which is more exclusive, Indian Creek or Star Island?
Indian Creek is the more restricted of the two on structural grounds. It is an incorporated village with its own government and public safety department, the island holds 41 homes per the New York Post, and a single bridge is the only vehicular connection to the mainland. Star Island has broader name recognition and a longer celebrity history, and its housing stock is far more varied, which puts a much wider spread of price bands behind the same gate.
Is La Gorce Island cheaper than Star Island and Indian Creek?
Generally, yes. La Gorce Island trades well below the levels Indian Creek has publicly recorded, and its lot mix is part of the reason. Some homes sit on open bay frontage, others on interior canals, and others on interior streets with no water at all. A buyer can choose how much premium frontage to pay for, which is far less true on the other two islands.
Can you visit these islands?
Not casually. Indian Creek limits entry across a guarded bridge, which the Village describes as the only vehicular connection to the mainland. Star Island's entry is controlled at a guard gate. La Gorce Island is gated and patrolled around the clock and is not open to the public. Access for a showing on any of the three is arranged through the listing side in advance.
Which island is best for a full-time family home?
La Gorce Island is usually the strongest fit. It functions as a year-round neighborhood rather than a collection of estates that sit empty for much of the year, which is closer to the pattern on Indian Creek and Star Island. Families also value the interior-lot option, which puts more of the budget into the house and less into water frontage.
Why do so few Indian Creek homes appear publicly for sale?
Because the island holds only 41 homes, per the New York Post, and owners transact quietly. Two owners rarely reach a decision in the same window, and when one does, the conversation usually starts privately with brokers who already know the island. Buyers who wait for a public listing are competing for the rare parcel that reaches the open market, generally on the seller's terms.
Does Indian Creek really have its own police force?
Yes. Indian Creek is an incorporated village, and the Village of Indian Creek operates its own public safety department covering the island. Press coverage of the island also describes a marine patrol as part of that coverage. That municipal structure, rather than a private guard contract, is the main reason the island's security posture differs in kind from Star Island's and La Gorce Island's.
Is La Gorce Island built around the La Gorce Country Club?
No, and this is a common error. La Gorce Island is a separate and much smaller island, connected by bridge to the main La Gorce neighborhood on Miami Beach. The La Gorce Country Club and its golf course sit in that mainland neighborhood, not on the island. The club is close by and is part of the area's appeal, but no home on the island fronts the golf course.
Can I replace a seawall or extend a dock on these islands?
Not on municipal approval alone. Florida's Department of Environmental Protection describes the Biscayne Bay Aquatic Preserve as running from the headwaters of the Oleta River south to Card Sound near Key Largo and covering 64,607 acres, established in 1974. Within the preserve, Florida Statute 258.397 prohibits dredging and filling except for defined purposes including the minimum dredging necessary for marinas, piers and docks and their attendant navigation channels, and it prohibits construction, replacement or relocation of seawalls without approval of the board of trustees, which the statute says may be granted only if riprap construction is used. Whether a specific parcel's submerged land falls inside the preserve boundary is a parcel-level question to confirm with the Department before budgeting marine work.
How do these islands compare with buying in Manhattan?
They solve different problems. Miami's islands sell land, water frontage and controlled access, and the tax posture is a material part of the calculation for a relocating buyer. Manhattan's trophy market sells height, light, views and a doorman-controlled address in a vertical building with no land component at all. Buyers active in both markets often hold one of each rather than choosing.
Speak with a Miami island advisor
For Indian Creek, Star Island and La Gorce Island, the opportunity that fits you is frequently not on a public portal. Tell us the island, the budget, the timing and the constraints that actually matter, whether that is dock depth, privacy posture, commute or rebuild appetite, and we will map a real target list including owners who have not listed.
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