On the other hand, there are signs that Florida’s white-hot real estate market has cooled. Sales of single-family homes were down 12% in September compared with the same time in the previous year. But interest rates, rising home prices and skyrocketing insurance costs likely played bigger roles than the recent hurricanes.
“Florida recovers much faster than you think,” said Brad O’Connor, chief economist for Florida Realtors.
What happens after a storm?
Studies of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast have shown that any outbound migration tends to be short-lived, and if people do leave, it’s usually a short-distance move, such as from a barrier island to the mainland. Older people with more financial resources are more likely to return to devastated communities.
When it comes to the housing market, there may be an initial shock to the supply as homeowners wait for reimbursement from insurance companies to fix up their homes or sell them.
But in the three years after a hurricane, home prices in areas of Florida that were hit by one are 5% higher on average than elsewhere in the state because of smaller supply, according to a study of the impact of hurricanes on Florida’s housing market from 2000 to 2016. New homeowners tend to be richer than previous ones since wealthier buyers can absorb price increases.
Other factors that determine how quickly communities bounce back include whether homes were insured, the speed of insurance reimbursements and whether there are enough construction workers. Because of stricter building codes implemented in the years after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, newer homes withstand hurricanes better than older ones, O’Connor said.
“If a property is damaged and uninsured, and the homeowner says, ‘I don’t want to deal with this,’ there are always people willing to scoop up that property because it’s valuable land,” he said. “People build new homes under the new codes and there’s less of an impact from hurricanes.”
Short term and long term
Recent storms offer examples what happens to communities, both short term and longer term.
In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, Hurricane Ian made landfall two years ago in what had been one of the fastest growing parts of the United States. Population growth slowed afterward to 1.5% from 4.4% before the storm. The number of households dropped from about 340,000 to about 326,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2019, three-quarters of all United Van Lines truck moves were into Lee County and a quarter were outbound, but that dropped to two-thirds inbound and a third outbound in 2023 to 2024, the company told The Associated Press.
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