Douglas Elliman CEO Dottie Herman discusses where high-income millennials are moving and whether or not New York will bounce back from the pandemic.
David Gewirtz never got used to the heat, not even after 15 years in Florida.
Gewirtz, who grew up in New Jersey, and his wife, Denise Amrich, still love their adopted hometown of Palm Bay, Florida, and would probably have stayed had it not been for the ‘cruel’ hurricanes.
“To stare at the track maps for weeks before a hurricane begins to create a level of tension,” he said. Gewirtz, a columnist on technology in his early 50s, said. “It’s been three weeks wondering if you’ll have a home in the end.”
The couple evacuated their home in Hurricane Irma in 2017, kept driving until they came to Oregon and decided to stay. They listed their Palm Bay home for sale.
It turns out that Florida is not for everyone. But you will never know it from the PR coming out of the state.
Amid the pandemic, politicians and real estate developers in Florida promoted the story that executives and tech workers from hedge funds, in search of hot weather and low taxes, are leaving New York and California en masse and taking root in Florida. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez used Twitter to reveal technological powers in Silicon Valley and invited Elon Musk to Miami for a discussion on tunneling under the city. In December, when venture capitalist Delian Asparouhov tweeted a proposal to relocate Silicon Valley to Miami, the mayor tweeted it to his followers, saying, “How can I help?”
Much less discussed, however, is the fact that each year nearly as many people move out of Florida as move in. They are fleeing hurricanes, heat and rising house prices. While COVID-19 has asked some outsiders to buy homes in Florida, the state’s population growth in the pandemic has slowed to the lowest rate since 2014, according to the State Demographic Estimates Conference in November 2020. Between April 2019 and April By 2020, the state’s population would increase by 1.83%, or 387,479 people. Between April 2020 and April 2021, however, the population is expected to grow by 1.38%, or 297,851 people.
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According to an annual study of migration patterns from the national relocation company Atlas Van Lines, in 2020 there were fewer relocations from other states to Florida than ever before. The study also found that about 50% of Florida movements in 2020 were incoming versus outgoing, down from 60% in 2015. In contrast, North Carolina, by contrast, has about 65% incoming movements.
The Atlas data show that in Florida ‘as many people move in as they move out’, said Barry Schellenberg, president and chief operating officer of Atlas, “which surprised me, because if you look at the news reports about the number of people moving to Florida , I expected the number [of incoming moves] is going to get bigger. ”
This may be news to the general public, but it’s no surprise to demographers. Florida’s overall population has grown steadily over the decades, but for the past twenty years, the state has also seen a large number of people leave each year, while many return to their homelands, said Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia. “A lot of people go there and realize they don’t like hurricanes,” he said. Lombard said.
The fact that the state’s booming luxury real estate market is tightening is limited: luxury house prices across the state have exploded in the pandemic, in part because of wealthy expatriates buying Florida homes. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reportedly paid $ 32 million for land on Miami’s exclusive Indian Creek Island. They did not respond to a request for comment. Rocky star Sylvester Stallone spent $ 35.375 million on a waterfront in Palm Beach a few months after selling his California home. New York hedge funder (and GameStop short seller) Gabe Plotkin paid $ 44 million for two adjoining homes on North Bay Road in Miami Beach.
The market is particularly strong in Palm Beach, where former President Donald Trump now lives and which has become popular among financial executives. Palm Beach County saw a huge increase in home sales in February, with more than twice as many contracts signed on the same apartments as the same month last year, and 95.4% more on single-family homes, according to a Douglas Elliman field report.
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In other parts of Florida there are low sales, but it is sluggish on the lower end of the market. In Miami-Dade County, for example, 197 contracts were signed in January for single-family homes worth more than $ 1 million, more than double the 77 in the same month last year, according to a report by Douglas Elliman. During the same period, contracts for homes under $ 500,000 fell by 56%. In the Naples area, there were 624 single-family sales in January, exceeding $ 2 million, an increase of 62% from the same month last year, while sales fell below $ 300,000 20%, according to data from the Naples Area Board or Brokers.
Many of these top buyers already own homes in Florida, whether as full-time residents or ‘snowbirds,’ “real estate agents said. Despite reports that Northeasters are fleeing Florida en masse, the state’s Demographic Estimates Conference has found only a “very small” increase in northeastern migration since the pandemic, according to Stefan Rayer, of the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs Research. “It doesn’t really move the needle,” he said.
Among the buyers who are new to Florida, it is not clear how much Florida will make their full-time home, and if they do, how long they will stay. Peter Zalewski, founder of the Miami real estate consulting firm Condo Vultures, said he has noticed over the years that many transplants in Florida do not last long. “A lot of people don’t last longer than five years,” he said. “They’re going home.”
Christopher Rim, 25, is one of the newcomers who is not sure if his move will be permanent. Founder of the New York-based education and university consulting firm Command Education, meets Mr. Usually rims his customers, which is why he decided in January to move from Manhattan to Miami. He spent two weekends looking for an apartment in Miami. When he found a two-bedroom with a balcony in the Surfside area, he submitted an offer within hours and eventually closed for about $ 4 million.
Mr. Rim said he views the venture as an experiment with Florida’s life. “It’s a time to try it out, to see how it goes in a year or two,” he said. “I’ll probably be in New York again, but who knows?”
He put his Tribeca two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment on the market for $ 3 million, but said he was in no hurry to sell. Meanwhile, he plans to open an office in Miami, but said his business remains in New York. “It’s just easier,” he said.
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Buyers overseas may be spending a lot of money on properties in Florida, but many are also hanging on to homes elsewhere. Jessica Cunningham, a 44-year-old interior designer, lives primarily with her husband and four children in the Chicago suburbs. They have been vacationing in the Palm Beach area for years and spend even more time there during COVID. This summer, they started looking for a home in the area to buy as a vacation property. They found the market to be ‘insane’, with homes selling within hours, she said. Finally in November, they paid about $ 1.1 million for a three-bedroom house in West Palm Beach.
They considered moving to Florida permanently, but in the end, they did not even keep the house. When they finished refurbishing it, she realized that “the market is so crazy that we could make some money from it.” A few weeks ago, they listed the house for $ 1.45 million with Lilly Leas Ferreira of Brown Harris Stevens and sold it for a full price to a cash seller before it was even on the market.
Meanwhile, this kind of rapid rise in house prices is one of the factors people have to leave, said Glenda Nichols, a real estate agent for Barn Owl Realty, in the mountain town of Ellijay in North Georgia. Since the pandemic began, Mrs. Nichols said she noticed a 30% increase in customers moving out of Florida, citing Sunshine State’s traffic, heat, humidity and increased housing costs. “You put it all together, and a lot of retirees come from Florida and come to North Georgia.”
One of Mrs. Nichols’ clients, David Lowe, sold his old home outside Sarasota, Fla., In 2019 for $ 375,000 and bought a similar home on a larger piece of land in northern Georgia for $ 180,000. He was a metal sculptor and spent another $ 50,000 building an art studio on the wooded property. For now, he still has a small place in Florida, but in the next few years he plans to make Georgia his full-time home. From New England, he wanted a change in the flat landscape in Florida and ‘smoky’ weather again. “I’m going to wake up every morning wondering, ‘Well, why am I still in Florida? ‘, He said.
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Jon Rork, a professor of economics at Reed College in Oregon, said Georgia and the Carolinas had become increasingly popular alternatives to retirees over the past fifteen years. He said many Northerners initially retire to Florida, but eventually return home or live elsewhere in the Southeast, which is called ‘half-back’.
Alan and Carol Ward moved from Massachusetts to the Sarasota area about eight years ago. But they found the summers “suffocatingly hot”, and they missed the four seasons, said Mr. Ward, a principal at the planning and design firm Sasaki, said. This fall, they bought a four-bedroom, 3-bath home in the mountains outside Greenville, SC, in the golf community of The Cliffs at Glassy. The area has separate but mild seasons. The summer is “still hot in South Carolina,” he said. Ward said, “but it’s not as bad or as long as in Florida.”