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Social media is overrun with breathless proclamations of the Florida housing market’s imminent collapse, and there are certainly reasons to be concerned.
Inventory has spiked, sales are sinking and prices in some areas have turned negative. Combine that with headwinds like high mortgage rates, economic uncertainty and rising insurance premiums and it’s easy to see where the alarm is coming from.
But what’s really happening in the Sunshine State? Are things that bad or have keyboard warriors hijacked the narrative? Like most things, it’s complicated.
“If you focus in a tunnel on one or two stats you’ll see a lot of the headlines, but the sky’s not falling,” said Nick Parrinello, cofounder of Tampa-based Agile Group Realty.
Inventory is well above pre-pandemic levels
The data most cited by Florida market doomers is inventory — it’s up. Way up.
The state was one of the hottest pandemic destinations, as sales exploded and pushed prices up along with it. Inventory sunk to severe lows relative to the total population. In some cases buyers were even signing contracts without even seeing the house.
That changed when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates for the first time in March 2022, and data from Altos on single-family homes shows this in no uncertain terms. At the time, inventory of single-family homes in Florida sat at 22,000. It has since risen by a shocking 363% to 102,000.
While new listings always jump in the spring, homes are coming onto the market in Florida at a significantly higher rate than last year. For the state as a whole, new listings are up 38.6%. That trend extends to the Miami metro area (36.7%) and Tampa (42.5%), Orlando (50.6%) and Jacksonville (29.3%) as well.
Buyers aren’t biting despite more options on the market
Like a lot of the country, inventory in Florida became scarce during the post-pandemic boom, as rock-bottom interest rates and the need for housing supercharged demand and thus home sales.
The rapid rise of mortgage rates in 2022 zapped that trend, and since then pending new home sales in Florida have followed the same general seasonality trend. However, sales of single-family homes are down considerably year over year.
The North Port metro area leads in annual declines at 17.3%, followed by Tampa (12.5%), Orlando (9.5%), Jacksonville (5.3%) and Miami (4.3%).
Mortgage rates are an obvious culprit for sagging sales, but anxiety over the direction of the economy is likely playing a role as well.
The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment index plunged to historic lows following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s new global tariff regime. A Redfin survey revealed a sizable share of respondents saying they’re either pausing or canceling their home searches.
The supply vs demand equation has prices falling
It wasn’t long ago that home prices in major Florida markets were rising by percentages well into double digits, but those days are long gone. Over the course of 2025, the pending new sales price has dropped into negative territory in some markets.
Florida’s pending new sale price of a single-family home is currently up 0.1% year over year, but the Miami metro area (-2.3%), Tampa (-4.5%) and Jacksonville (-2.8%) are all down compared to last year.
For Miami it’s a new trend, with prices turning negative beginning in April. Tampa and Jacksonville dipped below zero in January. Orlando entered the year up 4.3% annually but currently sits at a 0.7% rise.
Context is key for understanding Florida
Altos data heading into the summer certainly suggests Florida’s markets are struggling, and conditions are such that they could get worse before they get better. But it’s important to assess how Florida differs from the rest of the country — and in what ways it’s unique.
First, high mortgage rates have inventory rising all over the country. The number of homes for sale across the United States is up 31% year over year. New listings of single-family homes (up 14.1%), pending new sales (down 0.9%) and pending new sales price (0%) are all trending in the same direction as Florida.
While Florida’s trend lines on these metrics are more dramatic, they’re not fundamentally different from other states or the nation as a whole. And the severity of them could be considered circumstantial.
The metro areas of Tampa, Orlando and Fort Myers were hit hard by Hurricane Milton in October and entered 2025 at a disadvantage relative to the rest of Florida. At some point these markets will recover.
Florida is also grappling with rising home insurance premiums related to severe weather events, as major insurers have either raised their rates or pulled out of the state altogether.
“We’re still seeing people from the hurricane not knowing what they’re going to do with their houses in some of these flood-affected areas,” Parrinello said. “We still have inventory from the hurricanes nine months ago that are still undecided.”
The outlook may not be as apocalyptic as it sounds
Carl Reinhardt, a home builder equity analyst with BTIG, says that Florida fared better than a lot of the country in 2022 when mortgage rates began to rise and that some of the current softening is simply a delayed reaction to general market conditions.
“Every builder that I’ve talked to about this has said ‘we believe in Florida long-term, we plan to invest in these markets long term,” he said.
Parrinello agrees, saying he wouldn’t call the current market a crisis.
“I would call it a recalibration,” he said. “I’d say this is an opportunity for the market to readjust to existing conditions.”
