The population influx that Florida experienced after the COVID-19 pandemic has started to slow dramatically, with big implications for the state’s housing market.
While more people are still moving to the Sunshine State than moving out each year, the net increase has shrunk precipitously.
Last year, Florida gained just 64,017 new residents from net domestic migration, or the total number moving from another state in minus the total moving out. That’s down from 185,067 in 2023 and 314,467 in 2022, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
Housing experts say that Florida’s high home insurance costs, driven by elevated natural disaster risks in the state, are likely a factor in the slowdown. As well, Florida has one of the highest ratios of home prices to local incomes in the South, making it relatively less affordable than many of its neighbors.
Last month, home shopping traffic from Realtor.com® showed that just 38.5% of viewers of Florida home listings were from other states, compared with 45.1% in February 2024 and 50.4% in February 2023.
“In the past year or so, home shopping for properties in Florida by shoppers outside the Sunshine State has dwindled,” says Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner. “Florida is getting less attention from home shoppers in other states than it was in previous years, and home affordability in the state seems to be the main culprit.”
There are indications that other Southern states, including Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas, are grabbing some of the movers who might otherwise have considered Florida.
Those same states are also increasingly attractive to current Florida residents who are ready for a change.
A recent analysis from Cotality (previously known as CoreLogic) found that Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas are receiving 48% of mortgage applications for those moving out of the Sunshine State.
In addition to having lower median home list prices than Florida, those states also have lower natural disaster risks than the Sunshine State, which leads the nation in cumulative disaster costs, due largely to the impact of hurricanes.
“Florida’s rapid price appreciation combined with soaring home insurance prices and the threat of hurricanes has led people to start looking at other nearby states,” says Cotality Chief Economist Selma Hepp.
“When people leave, they are staying in the South, where there is relative affordability as well as access to large employment centers. They are seeking the ingredients that made Florida so prosperous in the first place,” she adds.
In one sense, Florida might be the victim of its own success, after a tidal wave of pandemic-related migration to the state pushed its housing market to the brink.
Despite Florida attracting 1.8 million new residents since 2020, a gain of nearly 9%, the construction of new homes failed to keep pace.
Permitting activity in the state plunged 9.7% in 2022, marking the first decline since 2009, according to the Cotality report. Activity fell again by 7.2% in 2023 amid labor shortages, rising material costs, and regulatory delays.
Since then, price pressures from tariffs and persistently high borrowing costs have only added to the pressure on developers, who are hesitant to start new projects.
Florida home prices under strain
The disconnect between supply and demand in Florida drove some of the biggest increases in home prices in the nation during the state’s population boom.
According to Cotality’s Home Price Index, Tampa prices increased 52% in the past five years. Jacksonville and Orlando saw a 50% jump.
“Migration to Florida markets resulted in strong demand for housing and some of the highest rates of home price appreciation since the onset of the pandemic,” says Hepp. “Among the largest U.S. metro areas, Miami tops the list with some of the highest cumulative increases in home prices over the last four-year period. Tampa was a close second.”
Now, there are signs the migration slowdown is starting to ripple through Florida’s housing market and put those trends in reverse.
In January, Tampa was the only city out of the nation’s top 20 metro areas to register an annual decline in home prices, according to the Case-Shiller index.
The supply of homes actively listed for sale in Florida has surged, rising 34% annually in February and exceeding pre-pandemic levels from 2019.
Florida homes are also taking significantly longer to sell, with the median time on the market of 73 days, more than a week longer than a year ago.
Home list prices in Florida have been steadily declining on an annual basis for nearly a year now, with February’s median list price of $435,000 down 5% from a year earlier.
“The momentum that the Florida housing market picked up in the wake of the pandemic appears to be waning, with prices down and time on market up this spring,” says Berner.
