Florida's pandemic housing boom is over. Are we headed toward a crash?

[Zorro]

Inventory is up. Prices are down. But buyers still aren’t biting.

For a time, Tampa Bay was one of the hottest housing markets in the country. But falling prices and lagging sales across the Sunshine State signal a stark reversal from the pandemic-fueled home buying boom.

“People were getting used to making huge profits on their houses in a short period of time,” said Michael Wyckoff managing broker of Engel & Völkers Madeira Beach. “That’s slowing down.”

The number of homes sold in the Tampa Bay metro area remained flat year over year, but dropped about 20% since 2022, from when the market was booming. That’s according to preliminary April data from Homes.com, a subsidiary of the real estate firm, CoStar Group.

Counties that were badly hit by Hurricanes Helene and Milton faced even greater losses. Since last year, sales decreased by 8% in Hillsborough County and almost 13% in Pinellas, according to April data from Suncoast Association of Realtors.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/real-estate/2025/05/22/tampa-bay-florida-home-market-buyer-seller/

Developers are still building homes like crazy around where I am now. Guess last year's hurricanes hasn't fazed them.

[hlthe2b]

1. That anyone is asking that in FL escapes me--with insurers pulling out or becoming prohibitively $$$, storms

becoming more deadly, destructive, frequent, and unrecoverable (with the dismantling of FEMA and MAGATs in office), with anti-abortion policies (and anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant) so regressive that no corporation in their right mind (or at least their employees) would want to relocate there, with universities dismantled due to anti-DEI brown shirt thugs making demands, removing funding (that not already devastated by Elon Musk's DOGE and RFK Jr's brain-addled know nothing defunding)...

And a local reporter posted THAT question--with, we presume, a straight face?

[bucolic_frolic]

2. Developers develop until there's no lumber or no insurance

and even then they will speculate until they run out of nails.

[mwmisses4289]

3. After the last few years of devastating hurricanes along the gulf coast states,

and the reporter asks a question where the obvious answer is "yes"?
People, if they can afford to, are slowly fleeing the so called sunshine states.

[Deuxcents]

4. County commissioners are approving development where there should not be..sensitive land areas

For what’s left of our wildlife, no infrastructure and plenty of protesting from us. They don’t care..if there’s a square foot of green, they wanna concentrate it and then people wonder why we have flooding issues. Like everything else, the $$ is the driving force.

[Alliepoo]

5. I go online to check homes for sale in FL-

Mostly in the New Smyrna Beach/Edgewater area. I’ve noticed that over the last couple of years that prices on existing homes have gone down and more recently that many listings show ‘reduced by $xx’ which makes me think there’s not as much interest or sales in available homes. But there are still a TON of new builds or to be built and it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If existing homes aren’t moving, why are builders still flooding the area with new housing?