Which is true: “Florida homes for sale quadruple to 53,000”, or “300,000 new homes built in Florida last year”?

Photo above - Cute, eh? But if Florida was really experiencing a surge in unsold homes, how could this "fixer upper" possibly be asking $500,000? (in my hometown, Tampa). At today's 6.5% mortgage rates I would need $160,000 annual income to buy this.

Someone is lying. Or possibly “hallucinating”. Newsweek says there’s a biblical style migration out of Florida (see link below). The challenger – Bing the AI robot – says that 303,000 new homes were built in Florida last year. They both can’t be true, can they?

Actually, they might be. And I’m going to side with Bing here, even though AI is clearly plotting the destruction of all human life and not telling us about it. Here’s how Newsweek may have gotten it wrong:

South Florida DOES have increased listings. I can well believe the 50K figure. There are beachfront geezer skyscrapers in Miami, eroding and tipping due to salt corrosion and pilings set too shallow in the sand. Hundreds of pics of this. There are also pics of mobile homes and cottages in swampy, low-lying areas. Unrestored after one or another of the hurricanes over the past several years. These are teardowns, because of the mold and rot. You're buying the land. There's no valid occupancy permit. Then there are vacancies due to normal death rates among Florida’s retirement population. If some intern at Newsweek did an internet query of “home many residential properties listed for sale in April" and then compared it to the 2022 pandemic lockdown number, the answer would be "quadruple". Hello, clickbait!

Okay, let’s move on. How does Bing come up with the opposite result? Same method. Bing would search for county and municipal construction permits. Okay, there’s 300,000 of THOSE. Probably some of those listings are still under construction. And probably more geezers are migrating to Florida to evade the super-high income taxes in New York and New Jersey. Just like some NON-geezers, such as Jeff Bezos, are fleeing California to homestead in Florida. We have zero income taxes.

Florida DOES get more than its share of storm damage. And thus higher insurance premiums, as well as rising condo maintenance fees if you live in a high-rise. That's a problem for senior citizens trying to juggle their social security checks and dwindling 401k/IRA balances. Is your annual social security benefit increase going to keep up with those insurance and condo fees? AI probably has a theory about this too. I didn’t bother to ask it. Because future insurance premiums and condo fees aren't as easy to data mine as construction permits.

I live just outside Tampa. If there were thousands of newly vacant homes with “for sale” signs posted near me, I’d be aware of it. The ones for sale this month are the same ones as I drove by in 2024. Plywood on the windows, overgrown landscaping, and greenwater pools. With mortgage rates tripled by the Federal Reserve, only pros or idiots want to take a loan and try their luck at rehabbing and flipping.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

South Florida Homes for Sale Quadruple As Residents Leave En Masse

how many new homes were built in florida last year 2000 - Search

ArishMell · 70-79, M

It does look odd but are many of the new homes in geographically more stable parts of the State, replacing those no longer habitable and saleable?

At face value that puts the replacement rate at well over five times the loss rate; but if your home becomes unliveable and unsaleable for what the insurers like to call "Acts of God" - so not insurable at any sensible premium, if at all - how do you afford one of the safer, newer ones in higher, more sheltered areas?

Or are all these surplus homes speculative, aimed at the retirement and second-home market able to pay straight off? It's a harsh thing to say but if the developers are paid fully by such buyers, it would not matter to them if the house only survives first occupancy unlikely to exceed forty or fifty years.

Still, you do say planning-permits; not only the physical homes completed or being built. Is it "Land Banking"? That may have a different name in the USA, but means buying land and obtaining outline planning-permission, gambling the value of the land and intended houses will rise enough for the difference to more than cover the land purchase and building costs - so the sale price is pure profit.

A variant in Britain, with examples local to me, is what I call "investment by dereliction": neglecting bought or already-owned, existing property for the same reason. I doubt it would work for the blocks of flats crumbling into the beach...

SusanInFlorida · 31-35, F

@ArishMell one would hope that we can break the cycle of rebuilding in areas prone to storm surge, swampy areas, and fire prone areas.

we don't let people build houses on toxic waste sites or nuclear test grounds, either.

ArishMell · 70-79, M

@SusanInFlorida Most likely if the planning authorities don't refuse permission for hazardous areas, the mortgage-lenders and insurers could refuse their services there. That might make it harder to sell the nomes, making them loss profitable for the developers.

Of those hazards the one with its UK equivalent is flooding, mainly by building on river flood-plains.

There are also a few stretches of coastline undergoing rapid erosion threatening homes that were a reasonable distance inland when built. Although heartbreaking for the home-owners concerned there is really little that can be done to protect them once the waves are lapping at the edge of the back garden, and I think already some houses have disappeared this way.