Ask five different sources how many houses sit inside The Moorings and you will get five different answers. One broker's site says 37. Another says 39. A third says 40. A fourth, updated more recently, says 43. This is not a typo repeated across the internet. It is what happens when a neighborhood almost never turns over enough for anyone to recount it with confidence.
That same instability shows up in the price data, and it matters more than the headcount ever will. A market report circulating in late 2024 put Moorings home sales between $1.5 million and $8.65 million, with an average of two to three closings a year. By 2026, brokerage listings for the same streets were quoting $10 million to $30 million and higher, with a current active listing on the market at $11.25 million and another asking $22.5 million for a 6,268-square-foot estate. That is not a market that tripled in a little over a year. It is a market so thin that whichever two or three homes happen to close in a given stretch become the entire published range.
If you are comparing Coconut Grove's gated enclaves and trying to figure out what a Moorings address actually costs, the first thing to understand is that the question does not have a stable answer, and understanding why will tell you more about how to bid than any single number would.
A Cul-de-Sac, Not a Market
The Moorings sits off Main Highway in South Grove, reached by two private roadways that circle a single cul-de-sac behind a 24-hour guard gate, just steps from Ransom Everglades School and Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart and along the Commodore Bike Trail. It was laid out in the early 1920s on land that had belonged to Frank Church and Jessie Moore, two well-known and active figures in the Grove community at the time, and it remains the only subdivision in Coconut Grove built under the 1920s Bright Plan, the same City Beautiful era planning philosophy that shaped neighboring Coral Gables. That pedigree is part of why the estates behind the gate are Mediterranean-style homes from the 1920s and 1930s sitting next to newer construction, all on half-acre-plus lots with private dockage and no-bridge access to Biscayne Bay.
It is also, structurally, a very small pond. Whether the true count is 37 or 43, you are talking about fewer than four dozen homes on a footprint that has not expanded since it was platted a century ago. In a subdivision that size, even a "normal" 5 to 7 percent annual turnover rate produces only two or three transactions a year, and that ceiling has not moved much regardless of which year you check.
Why Two or Three Sales a Year Breaks the Median
A median price only means something when enough transactions feed it that outliers cancel each other out. In a neighborhood with hundreds of annual sales, one $30 million trophy estate barely moves the number. In The Moorings, that same sale is the number.
Here is what that looks like across sources gathered at different points:
| Snapshot | Reported price range | What was likely being measured |
|---|---|---|
| Late 2024 | $1.5M to $8.65M, roughly 2-3 sales per year | A mix of non-waterfront and smaller waterfront homes that closed that year |
| Early 2026 | $10M to $30M+ | A different broker's characterization, likely weighted toward waterfront estates |
| Current active listings | $6.75M to $29.5M | Homes currently on market, not necessarily comparable in size or water frontage |
| Current single active listing | $11.25M | One 0.4-acre listing, at that moment the only one showing |
None of these numbers are wrong. They are each an accurate snapshot of a different, tiny sample. The apparent jump from the 2024 figures to the 2026 figures almost certainly reflects which homes happened to transact and which happened to be listed at the moment each report was pulled, not a uniform repricing of the enclave. A buyer who anchors to whichever range they saw first on a portal is anchoring to sampling noise, not to the market.
The Reason the Sample Stays Small
Low turnover in The Moorings is not a temporary supply crunch waiting to correct. It is close to the design. Brokers who track the community consistently describe the same pattern: homes are rarely listed because they are passed down to new generations rather than sold. Add to that the well-documented habit among Coconut Grove's gated communities of trading quietly, off-market, between principals who already know each other, and the two or three closings that show up in public records in a given year likely understate total activity, not overstate it.
That combination, generational retention plus off-market dealing, means the visible comps you can pull from MLS or a portal are not just few in number. They are also a biased subset. The homes that trade publicly may skew toward estates without an obvious next-generation heir, or toward owners willing to accept broader marketing exposure. The quiet transfers between families who already know the buyer never enter the comp set at all.
What This Actually Means for an Offer
If you are underwriting a purchase in The Moorings, or comparing it against similarly small enclaves like Hughes Cove or Camp Biscayne, the practical takeaway is not to distrust the published numbers outright. It is to stop treating any single median or range as if it describes a liquid market, because it does not.
A few adjustments follow from that:
- Ask for the actual closed sale history over the past 24 to 36 months, not a single-year snapshot, and separate waterfront from non-waterfront trades before comparing price per square foot.
- Treat an active listing's asking price as a data point about that seller's expectations, not as evidence of where the next sale will land, since the sample of currently active homes may look nothing like the sample that closed last year.
- Recognize that dock rights and riparian access, explicitly called out in several recent listing descriptions, carry a premium that a simple price-per-square-foot comparison will not capture on its own.
- Ask any agent representing you in the enclave whether they have visibility into off-market activity, since a meaningful share of Moorings transactions may never reach a public database at all.
The Naming Confusion Worth Clearing Up
One more wrinkle for anyone researching this online: the word "moorings" also refers to the actual boat moorings scattered around Biscayne Bay, including a protected mooring field of roughly 175 slots maintained by the Coconut Grove Sailing Club. That field has nothing to do with the residential enclave off Main Highway beyond sharing a name rooted in the same sailing culture. If your search results start mixing dock rules with real estate listings, that is why.
A Short FAQ
How many homes are actually in The Moorings? Public sources disagree, ranging from 37 to 43. The discrepancy likely comes from how different counts treat adjacent parcels and later infill construction on a subdivision platted in the 1920s, not from any actual change in the footprint.
Why does the price range swing so much between sources? Because the enclave produces so few transactions in a given year, roughly two to three based on the most detailed tracking available, that whichever handful of homes close or list in a given window becomes the entire published range. It is a sample-size problem, not evidence of sudden appreciation.
Does the Grove's broader gated-community market behave the same way? Similar enclaves like Hughes Cove and Camp Biscayne share the same low-turnover, generational-ownership pattern, so the same caution about reading medians applies across most of South Grove's private communities, not just The Moorings.
Buying into an enclave this small is less about finding the right comp and more about finding someone who has watched enough of the quiet transactions to know what the public numbers are missing. If you are evaluating The Moorings or comparing it against Coconut Grove's other gated addresses, Chanel Hunter Homes can walk you through what the visible data does and does not tell you before you write an offer. Request Curated Guidance to start that conversation.
