1000 people per day are moving to Florida and they need a place to live as millions of people are leaving states like New York. In fact, a recent study suggested more than one third of all NYC residents are considering leaving. Helping to drive this is the historically low interest rates and opportunities to work from home due to COVID. Florida isn't only a great destination for New Yorkers, it is also the number one destination for international buyers.
You can imagine what this is doing to the Florida housing market. I watched one house get listed at midnight, first showing was at 8am, and it was sold at 11am. The inventory for existing houses is very low because Floridians have no place to move to. When a house does come on the market, it will often get purchased site unseen within just a few days.
We didn't want to buy a house unseen and we can't react fast enough to house sales when we are 1200 miles away. We decided to, instead, build a house so that we could have a little more control over location and move dates.
What we found is that home builders are challenged with keeping up with the demand. We went to one community and the seller told us the current phase was sold out. We asked when the next phase opens up and she said "that phase is sold out too". We looked at Ryan Homes on Grassy Lake: they can only build 4 houses per month. They have a waiting list of people who want to sign contracts. Haines City has capped builders, such as Highland Meadows, to submitting only 11 houses for approval per month because Haines City can't keep up with the demand.
Our plan is to go to a KB Homes site in Minneola. Before KB Homes has even nailed one board, 25% of the community is already sold! KB Homes raises the base price of the home every time they sell 5 houses. That means we can expect to gain $50K in equity by the time the community sells out! And that timeframe might be in just a year or two.
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