On the other hand, there are signs that Florida’s hot real estate market has cooled. Single-family home sales were down 12% in September compared to the same period a year earlier. But interest rates, rising home prices and skyrocketing insurance costs likely played a bigger role than recent hurricanes.

“Florida is recovering a lot faster than you think,” said Brad O’Connor, chief economist for Florida Realtors.

What happens after a storm?

Studies of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast have shown that any outbound migration tends to be short-lived and that if people do leave, it is usually short-distance movement, e.g. a barrier island to the mainland. Older people with more financial resources are more likely to return to devastated communities.

As for the real estate market, there could be an initial supply shock as homeowners wait for reimbursement from insurance companies to repair their homes or sell them.

But in the three years following a hurricane, housing prices in areas of Florida that were affected by a hurricane are on average 5% higher than elsewhere in the state due to lower supply, according to a study of the impact of hurricanes on Florida’s real estate market from 2000 to 2016. New owners tend to be wealthier than previous owners because wealthier buyers can absorb price increases.

Other factors that determine how quickly communities bounce back include whether homes were insured, the speed of insurance payouts and whether there are enough construction workers. Due to stricter building codes Implemented in the years after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, newer homes are more hurricane-resistant than older ones, O’Connor said.

“If a property is damaged and uninsured and the owner says, ‘I don’t want to deal with that,’ there are always people willing to take that property back because it’s valuable land,” he said. he declared. “People are building new homes to the new codes and the impact of hurricanes is less.”

Short term and long term

Recent storms provide examples of what is happening to communities, both in the short and long term.

In Lee County, home to Fort Myers, Hurricane Ian made landfall two years ago in what had been one of the fastest-growing regions of the United States. Population growth then slowed to 1.5%, compared to 4.4% before the storm. The number of households increased from about 340,000 to about 326,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2019, three-quarters of all United Van Lines truck movements occurred within Lee County and one-quarter overseas, but that figure fell to two-thirds inbound and one-third outbound. foreign between 2023 and 2024, the company told The Associated Press.