The headline you keep hearing is that there are not enough homes for sale. The data tells the opposite story. Right now we do not have a seller shortage, we have a buyer shortage, and it is pushing parts of the Sun Belt back toward pre-2020 conditions. Here is what is actually happening, and what it means if you are buying or selling in Florida.
Buyer demand is near record lows
Home buyer demand in May 2026 is grinding along the bottom, close to where it sat during the great financial crisis. The single biggest reason is the mortgage rate. We went from roughly 3% to about 6.5%, and in a payment-driven economy that change alone prices a large share of buyers out. When demand falls, pending sales follow. Closed existing-home sales recently hit their lowest monthly level since 2009, and in our own Northeast Florida market pending sales are down roughly 31% from a year ago.
You can see the second-order effects everywhere. Active inventory is rising, homes are sitting longer, price cuts are accelerating week over week, builders are dangling large incentives, and mortgage applications remain weak. The through-line is affordability near record lows.
It is a buyer shortage, not a housing shortage
Redfin's data frames it cleanly. There are roughly 1.99 million sellers against about 1.36 million buyers, and the buyer count is shrinking. When a seller cannot find a buyer, many simply give up, pull the listing, and turn the house into a rental. We call those accidental landlords, and they are multiplying.
That matters because a wave of former listings becoming rentals pushes rents down. Once rents drop, renting becomes an even easier comparison for would-be buyers: why buy when you can rent a similar home, save a meaningful amount every month, and invest the difference? For the first time in years, buyers have leverage. That is healthy for the market, but it is the opposite of a shortage.
Accidental landlords and falling rents
Accidental landlords are now around 6.9% of active U.S. rentals and climbing, concentrated in the states that boomed hardest, Florida and Texas among them. As those homes flood the rental pool, they compete with a wave of build-to-rent and luxury multifamily product, especially here in Florida. The result is softening rents and concessions that were unthinkable a couple of years ago, including up to three months of free rent to fill a unit. We expect rents to keep drifting lower into the end of the year across much of the Sun Belt. We covered the early version of this shift in how the rental narrative changed.
The market did not slow down. It froze.
Turnover is at one of the lowest levels in decades. Owners are locked into low pandemic-era rates and cannot afford to trade into a new loan in the sixes, so they stay put. Typical tenure has stretched from about 8 to 10 years to something closer to 10 to 12. The same unaffordability that keeps buyers out keeps sellers in, which is why closed sales keep grinding along the bottom. We unpacked this in why the housing market froze and where Jacksonville's inventory actually went.
The affordability math no longer works
At this point in the cycle, buying a home can run about 50% more per month than renting a comparable one, and that is before insurance, property taxes, and maintenance that typically runs 1% to 2% of the home's value every year. Ownership is not the fixed cost buyers assume it is.
The strain shows up in who is actually transacting. The median age of all home buyers has climbed to around 60, and first-time buyers are now near 40. People are delaying, and the ones who can buy are usually further along, often selling an existing home and rolling equity into the next one. Even after the decline since late 2022, the home-value-to-income ratio is still far above its long-run norm. Where prior generations bought at roughly three times income, many younger buyers face four times or more, with higher taxes and insurance on top. By one analyst's estimate, once you add shelter (now north of 30% of income for many households), child care, food, transportation, and healthcare, something like $136,000 of income has become the new break-even for a middle-class life in a lot of markets. Consumer sentiment sits near record lows and credit-card delinquencies are approaching financial-crisis levels, all before any meaningful rise in job losses.
Migration is reversing, and Florida feels it first
The pandemic wave that pushed Northeast and West Coast buyers into Jacksonville, Florida, and Texas drove prices to records and priced out many locals. Now some of those movers are heading back, and new movers are increasingly choosing the Midwest, where the price-to-income math still works. When migration patterns flip, prices in speculative markets correct. Year over year, single-family prices are now falling across 27 of Florida's 28 metros. Florida depends on steady in-migration to grow, so this reversal is a real headwind, and it is exactly why local expertise beats a state or metro headline.
The new-construction glut and builder buydowns
Despite the shortage narrative, the new-home pipeline is enormous. By stage of construction, the backlog of homes not yet started has skyrocketed past even financial-crisis levels. Builders would rather protect the sticker price and buy down your rate, because they can purchase those buydowns in bulk far more cheaply than cutting the price outright. One major national builder's SEC filings show its net average selling price, after incentives, fell from about $491,000 in 2022 to roughly $371,000, lower than it was even in 2019. When a builder keeps discounting through phase two, three, and four of a community, earlier buyers can end up underwater.
The takeaway: if you are buying new construction, late in a community's phasing and into year-end, there is real room to negotiate as builders push to hit their numbers. Do not do it without a sharp local agent. Start with our new-construction builders overview.
Why prices rose, and where they might go
Step back and the driver is clear: four decades of falling mortgage rates did most of the work. Various analyses attribute somewhere between 50% and 80% of the last 40 years of price appreciation to declining rates. In a payment economy, the consumer maxes out the monthly payment, and right now households are maxed out on credit cards, autos, student loans, and mortgages all at once. With rates up rather than down, the engine that inflated prices has gone into reverse.
My read, based on the investment-banking-style models I have run, is a roughly 31% to 42% decline in prices over the next 5 to 10 years, a slow grind rather than an overnight crack, with real resistance on the way down. This is my forecast and opinion, not a guarantee.
This will not play out evenly. The Northeast, which did not overbuild or over-speculate, is actually seeing price appreciation, even as it deals with aging inventory and younger residents leaving for affordability. The Sun Belt, Florida and Texas especially, is where the air comes out first.
What this means if you are buying or selling in Florida
If you are selling, your competition is the rental market and a stack of builder incentives. Price to today's market, not last year's comp, and lean on condition and marketing to stand out. If you are buying, run the rent-versus-buy math honestly with our free rent vs. buy calculator, plan to stay long enough for ownership to pay off, and be careful with late-phase new construction. The right number is never the metro headline, it is the recent comparable sales in your specific neighborhood.
Track the live local picture on our Jacksonville housing market page and the Florida county scorecards. If you want a straight answer on your situation, or a top local agent to negotiate for you on a resale or a builder deal, talk to our founders or call (904) 351-6461.
This article summarizes Jon Brooks's market commentary and includes his personal forecasts and opinions. It is for general informational purposes only and is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice. Market projections are inherently uncertain and are not a prediction for any specific property. Consult a licensed professional about your situation.