Replies

This is a recent stat. Which kind of surprised me too.
It was a guy on YouTube who calls himself Reventure Consulting. He mostly tries to sell you his AP. However, I started subscribing to him a few years ago. He showed a graph of inbound and outbound migration in USA cities that Bank Of America had published.

I am a lumber broker. My company subscribes to a publication called Random Lengths that prints commodity lumber pricing.
Monthly they put out a letter with the Housing Permits by Metro Area. This way you can see what parts of our country are growing or contracting. Florida has been booming for ten years. It really picked up during covid. As did all the southern RED markets.

Each metro area boomed to some extent.
As of August building Permits they were as follows YTD 2024 vs 2025:
Ft Myers (-3) %
Jacksonville (-10)
Lakeland/Winterhaven (-16)
Tampa (-3)
Miami +23
Orlando +21

So, from the numbers above Miami and Orlando are still growing with a pretty large percentage increase over the previous year. However, what has changed across Florida is that it is no longer a Cheap place to retire to from up north. Unless that up north is NYC.

Another thing is that Orlando is now in the top ten in the USA for housing starts and permits with 20K permits so far in 2025. Dallas/Ft Worth and Houston are still number one and two(46K & 44K). Phoenix is still number three(25K). Atlanta, NYC, LA & the valley are 4, 5 & 6. I think Orlando is the 7th or 8th largest VOLUME of houses being built in the country.

Keep in mind that FL,TX, AZ & CA have more starts than most of the rest of the country combined. Especially up here in the NE where they never build big subdivisions. Or a big apartment complex is 4-6 buildings.

I watch the PBD Podcast all the time. I think they do it from somewhere around West Palm Beach. They are always talking about what is going down in South Florida.
How all the big money people are moving there.
How they expect even more to leave NYC to come south.

I think the issue now with Florida is that it is no longer a inexpensive place to retire in the sun.
Unless you are going to move to Apalachacola(sp?) or someplace north of Tampa.