ORLANDO, Fla. – Florida has jumped New York as the second-most valuable U.S. market, according to a report from Zillow.
Of the six markets where home values have increased the most since the start of the pandemic, four are in Florida: Tampa (+88.9%), Miami (+86.6%), Jacksonville (+82.4%) and Orlando (+72.3%).
Mark Jones, a town architect with LRK, says Florida’s population growth coupled with the low supply of housing has been a catalyst for the spike in home prices.
“It’s supply and demand, and then when you look at who is moving here it’s the baby boomer generation, the wealthiest generation,” Jones said. “When you put that on top of higher interest rates, people staying in place in their existing homes and lowering the pool of available homes, it certainly is a means to inflate the price.”
[EXCLUSIVE: Become a News 6 Insider (it’s FREE) | PINIT! Share your photos]
New home construction significantly slowed after the Great Recession, leading to a housing deficit, but as homebuilders try to chip away at the shortage and more homes hit the market, Florida’s affordability continues to slip away.
“There’s a cost to this growth,” Jones said. “Whether it’s higher property taxes for those of us here, whether it’s a tax on the infrastructure, the lack of affordable housing is one of the number one pieces. How do we solved that with this growth and this increase of property values?”
Jones and his firm are behind the popular Central Florida communities of Celebration, Baldwin Park and Oakland Park, so he understands what it takes to make a new development successful.
“A development coming in, as long as it has the factors of good planning principles that creates diversity but also creates open space and the accessibility of that open space, it can work,” Jones said. “It’s really thinking through how we solve the problem without just going out and overdeveloping to just accommodate the masses coming in.”
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: