Run from Water; Hide from Wind

A mix of prognostications about Florida’s housing market are, and will continue to, emerge in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

The natural inclination may be to assume the one-two punch of storms will add to a market already taking on water because of increasing property insurance rates and new regulations that have hampered condominium owners. However, others believe the factors that initially made Florida an attractive paradise – warm weather, friendly state tax, new building codes strengthened in the ‘90’s – will continue to prevail.

And, while it is incredibly early to assess Helene’s and Milton’s impacts, there are also indications that the latest storms will amplify an emerging trend of Floridians moving away from coastal communities to inland areas that provide a buffer to the storm surge and damaging winds of hurricanes.

The question becomes where do, or will, the residents go? Do they leave the state, rebuild on the coast, or move inland? Shark Tank star and Miami resident Kevin O’Leary downplayed the impact of the storms during an interview hours before Milton made landfall.

"I live in Florida… we have lived with bad weather forever,” O’Leary said on a Fox Business program. “This is hurricane season. This is a particularly bad hurricane season. But what drives Florida is a great policy on tax, great business regulatory environments.”

“You've got lots of jobs there. You've got all these guys from New York and New Jersey and Massachusetts moving there, moving their financial services companies because of the punitive tax regimes of those states," he added. “There comes a point in your life when you're just too old to be cold, and you want to be warm. I like to wear flip-flops. I walk on the beach every day. I ride my bike 12 miles. Listen, I can't get that anywhere else.”

West Central Florida’s six-county coastal region – Hernando, Pasco, Pinellas, Hillsborough, Manatee and Sarasota – has a population of 4 million people according to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, but you may be surprised to learn that more and more of those people live away from the coast.

Hillsborough County’s planning commission notes that only 9 percent of the residents live in what they term as “Coastal High Hazard Areas.” In the City of Tampa, only 17 percent of the residents live in Coastal High Hazard Areas.

Now, considering those numbers, perhaps when it comes to home purchases, new and current residents may continue to embrace the old hurricane adage: run from water, hide from wind.