Not just condos: Florida’s housing market is softening, especially along the southwest coast

Sat, Mar 15, 2025, 6:00 AM 5 min read

Florida’s pandemic-era housing boom is finally starting to fade.

For-sale inventory in the state has reached the highest levels on record, and homes are staying on the market longer even as peak homebuying season kicks off. In many parts of the state, prices are starting to fall.

The turning market comes as migration to the Sunshine State slows, and a combination of hurricane fears, rising insurance and tax bills, and a steady supply of new construction has given buyers more leverage. While the state’s condo market has been in correction ever since new building laws took effect in the aftermath of the 2021 condo collapse in Surfside, Fla., the market for single-family homes is also starting to soften.

“Inventory and time on market has been dramatically increasing,” said Ben Grieco, a real estate agent in the southwestern city of Port Charlotte. “It’s not like buyers have left by any means, but there’s just so much to choose from that it’s really pushing prices down.”

Listings across the state usurped pre-pandemic levels in January, according to Realtor.com. As of last month, there were more than 168,000 homes active on the market. Residences in Florida spent an average of 75 days on the market, up 13 days from a year earlier, according to Redfin.

As of January, single-family home prices were falling the fastest in a cluster of cities on the southern Gulf Coast. Prices in Punta Gorda are down nearly 8% since January 2024, according to Zillow data. Thirty miles south, in Cape Coral, home prices have dropped 5.6% year over year.

Prices in North Port and the high-end, golf-focused city of Naples have also fallen by more than 3% in the last year.

‘People are worried’

Memories of Hurricane Ian, which devastated a number of southwest Florida communities in 2022 and was the costliest storm in the state’s history, still loom large with today’s buyers and sellers, said Rick Harrison, a Fort Myers-based real estate agent. Buyers are asking detailed questions about homes’ flooding history, while sellers are motivated to complete transactions before the next hurricane season starts in June.

“Everybody at this point has been educated enough to know that hurricanes had a huge impact on our area,” Harrison said. “On both sides, people are worried.”

Yet even as prices fall, many buyers are struggling to afford what’s available for sale. The median listing price in the state is $435,000. It’s been drifting lower since mid-2022 but is still 32% higher than at the end of 2019. The prices, coupled with mortgage rates above 6%, have left many would-be buyers shut out of the market entirely, contributing to the inventory glut.