Shadow Inventory and the Builder Discounts That Never Show on Paper

Florida does not have a housing shortage. It has a mismatch, a pipeline almost nobody counts, and a repricing that will take years to finish.

I went on Market Insider last week and said something that gets me in trouble every time I say it: the housing shortage story you keep hearing does not describe the market I work in every day.

I want to be careful here, because this argument gets flattened into a headline within about ten seconds. So let me start with what I am not saying.

First, what I am not arguing

I am not arguing that housing shortages are a myth. They are real, and in some places they are severe.

If you live in Boston, coastal California, or large parts of the Northeast, you live in a market where it is genuinely, structurally hard to build. Zoning is restrictive. Land is constrained. Approvals take years. Construction costs are punishing. Those markets have been under-building for decades, and it shows up in prices, in rents, and in young people leaving.

That is a real shortage. I am not here to tell those people their experience is fake.

What I am arguing is narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: housing is not a national market, and a national average can hide two opposite problems at the same time.

The United States can have a genuine deficit of homes in constrained metros while Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado simultaneously carry too much of the wrong product at the wrong price. Both things are true right now. Averaging them together produces a number that describes nowhere.

Ask anyone who tells you there is a national shortage two questions:

Which market?
Which product, at which price point?

The answers usually fall apart, because a shortage of $250,000 starter homes in Jacksonville and a glut of $700,000 new-construction homes in the same county are not offsetting problems. They are separate problems that happen to share a zip code.

Here is the part people miss. A shortage is measured against demand, and demand is not population, it is qualified buyers. You can add residents and lose buyers at the same time, and that is roughly what has happened. Wages in Northeast Florida have not kept pace with either general inflation or housing costs. Jacksonville home prices roughly doubled over the last decade while wages rose something closer to half that. Florida's median household income sits near $68,000. Comfortably carrying a typical home here, once you load in the taxes and the insurance we actually pay, takes something closer to $100,000 to $115,000.

That gap is the whole story. More people, fewer buyers (especially locals, who are often priced out).

What actually happened: a demand shock, not a shortage

Before 2020, nobody in Jacksonville was talking about a shortage. We had inventory. We had normal days on market. The market functioned.

Then we got a demand shock.

Between 2020 and 2022, historically low interest rates collided with a migration wave, and Florida absorbed something like a decade of demand in about three years. Hedge funds and mom-and-pop investors piled into starter homes, accelerating a trend that had been running quietly since 2012. Prices went vertical.

Builders did what any rational business would do. They built where the margin was, which in Florida meant the mid-level luxury band roughly between $500,000 and $700,000. A builder can make several times more gross profit on a $700,000 house than a $200,000 house using the same crew, the same permitting process, and roughly the same overhead. I do not blame them for that decision. I would have made it too.

But that decision assumed the demand wave would keep rolling.

It did not.

Florida's net domestic migration (that is domestic only, people moving here from other states, not international immigration and not natural population change) went like this, per Census Bureau estimates compiled by the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research:

Year	Florida net domestic migration
2022	310,892
2023	183,646
2025	22,517

That is a decline of roughly 93% in three years. Florida, which spent years at or near the top of the national migration rankings, finished 2025 ranked eighth. Miami-Dade County alone recorded a domestic net loss of nearly 73,000 residents.

International migration, which mattered enormously to Florida, has also fallen sharply from its peak.

I want to be precise about what this does and does not prove. It does not prove Florida is emptying out. Mid-sized counties like Polk, Pasco, and Marion are still growing, and Northeast Florida is still adding people.

What it proves is that the demand assumption underneath a very large amount of 2021-2023 construction is no longer valid. Builders committed capital to lots based on a migration curve that has since fallen by more than 90%.

You cannot un-pour a foundation when the demand forecast changes.

Why builders discount without cutting the price

Here is where brokerage experience matters more than any dataset, because this is the part you can only see from inside a transaction.

When a builder cuts the sticker price on a home, it creates a new, lower comparable sale for every remaining home in that community. That damages appraisals on homes still under contract, angers buyers who closed last quarter, and resets the value of the entire remaining phase. It is the most visible and most expensive way for a builder to move a house.

So builders reach for tools that lower the buyer's monthly payment without lowering the recorded price.

This is not a fringe practice and it is not a conspiracy. It is disclosed, it is legal, and it is now the dominant form of discounting in American homebuilding. Per NAHB survey data, 63% of builders reported using sales incentives in July 2026, the sixteenth consecutive month at 60% or higher, and that share hit 67% in December 2025, the highest in more than five years.

The main instruments:

Mortgage rate buydowns, frequently financed through the builder's own affiliated lender using forward commitments purchased in bulk. This is the big one, because a builder can buy a rate reduction wholesale far more cheaply than it can absorb an equivalent price cut.
Closing cost credits, which cover real cash the buyer would otherwise bring to the table.
Design center and upgrade packages, where the builder sets the stated value of the incentive. A flooring or fixture package presented as a $15,000 upgrade may cost the builder a fraction of that at their trade pricing.
Lender-paid incentives tied to using the affiliated mortgage company, which is why the financing conversation and the price conversation are never really separate.

How big is this? Industry-wide, incentives are running somewhere around 7% to 8% of sale price. And this is the number I would put in front of any skeptic: PulteGroup disclosed incentives at 10.9% of gross sales price in the first quarter of 2026. That is a public company, in its own filings, telling you that roughly eleven cents of every sales dollar is going back out the door as incentive.

When I said on the show that builders are using up to 10% of a home's value to move product, that was not a guess from the field. It is in the financials.

Now, the honest nuance, because I want this argument to survive contact with someone who actually follows the builders: builders are also cutting prices outright. NAHB reported 37% of builders cutting prices in July 2026, at an average reduction of about 6%. So the accurate statement is not "builders never cut prices." It is that incentives are roughly twice as common as price cuts, and incentives are the portion that never reaches the public price record.

That distinction matters enormously for you as a buyer, and here is why.

How the discount reaches you	What you get	Does it show in public price data?	Your resale risk
Outright price cut	Lower loan, lower recorded price	Yes. This is why builders resist it	Lowest. Your basis is genuinely lower
Rate buydown	Lower monthly payment	No. Sale records at full price	Higher. You own at full price with a below-market rate you cannot transfer
Closing cost credit	Less cash at closing	No	Higher. Same problem
Upgrade or design credit	Finishes, at a value the builder sets	No	Highest. Upgrades rarely return their stated value at resale

If you buy at a recorded price of $600,000 with $60,000 of incentives attached, the county records a $600,000 sale. But the economic price of that house was closer to $540,000. When you try to sell in three or four years, you are competing against a builder who is still selling the next phase with the same incentive structure.

That is how buyers end up underwater without the price index ever appearing to crash.

The inventory almost nobody counts

Months of supply is the number everyone quotes, and in new-construction-heavy markets it is close to useless on its own.

Here is why. Months of supply is typically built from active MLS listings. But in many new construction communities, and this is consistent with what our agents see and what builder representatives tell us directly, builders list only a model or two in the MLS. The rest of what they control does not appear.

What does not appear breaks into five distinct buckets, and they carry very different timelines:

Completed standing inventory. Finished, vacant homes with a certificate of occupancy. This is immediately competitive with your resale listing today. Drive the community and you will see them.
Homes under construction. Vertical, unsold, delivering in weeks or months. This is competition for the next two quarters, and the builder's carrying costs are running the entire time.
Finished lots. Cleared, permitted, utilities in. A builder can go vertical here on short notice, and the capital is already sunk, which is precisely why they will build rather than sit.
Planned or platted phases. Phase two, three, and four. Entitled, financed, and scheduled. Not competition this month, very much competition over a multi-year hold.
Land pipeline and option contracts. The longest-dated bucket, and the one builders can actually walk away from, which is exactly what they do when demand breaks.

Only bucket one, and only sometimes, reaches your headline inventory number.

This is why I get frustrated with a clean "4.5 months of supply, that's a seller's market" take. Months of supply is a snapshot of listed competition. It says almost nothing about committed competition. A resale seller in a new construction corridor is not competing against the six houses listed on their street. They are competing against a builder with finished lots, a sales trailer, an affiliated lender, and a strong institutional incentive to keep the recorded price high while discounting the payment.

You are not competing with a neighbor. You are competing with a balance sheet.

Where does the visible data support the oversupply case? Condominiums, most clearly. Florida condo and townhouse inventory ran about 8.1 months in the second quarter of 2026, and condo-specific readings in parts of the state have been running considerably higher, with South Florida condos around 10 months in June 2026 and some measures of Florida condo supply in the 12-month range, against single-family closer to 4.5 months. Whatever else you want to call that, it is not a shortage. Condos also carry Florida-specific pressure that single-family does not: milestone inspection requirements and reserve funding rules have pushed association costs up hard, and that shows up as both new listings and dead deals.

So when someone tells you Florida has a housing shortage, the fair response is: which product? Because the condo market and the entry-level single-family market are telling opposite stories in the same county.

Rents: what is actually happening, and where I need to be precise

On the show I said rents are down 10% to 20% from the peak in some areas. That is true in specific submarkets and on a net effective basis, and it is not true as a metro-wide asking-rent statistic. Those are different measurements.

Here is the honest picture for Jacksonville, which is the market I know best:

Metro average asking rent is roughly flat to modestly down. Jacksonville apartment rents are running around $1,504, down about 0.4% year over year, with broader Florida metro readings down in the 1.4% to 1.9% range.
Vacancy is the real story. Jacksonville multifamily vacancy has climbed to roughly 12.2%, the highest among Florida's major metros, as new deliveries outpaced absorption. Vacancy moves before face rent does.
Concessions are widespread. Free rent periods and waived fees are standard on new lease-ups. This is why net effective rent, what the landlord actually collects over the lease term, has fallen considerably more than the advertised rent.

The distinction is simple. A landlord will give you two months free before they will drop the advertised rent, for the same reason a builder will buy your rate down before they cut the price: the concession is invisible to the comp set, and the price cut is permanent and public. Same playbook, different asset.

Layer on the supply side. Jacksonville absorbed a large multifamily delivery wave at the same time that sellers who could not get their number started renting their homes out instead. Those accidental landlords are not underwriting a rental business. They are covering a mortgage. They compete directly with professionally managed apartments, and they are far more willing to take a below-pro-forma number because their alternative is a listing that will not sell.

Multifamily distress: some of it is public, most of it is deferred

There is real distress on the multifamily side, and the reason you have not seen a wave of headlines is not that it does not exist. It is that commercial real estate does not reprice the way stocks do.

A lot of 2021 and 2022 multifamily was acquired with floating-rate bridge debt on two to three year terms, underwritten to aggressive rent growth and an exit cap rate that assumed cheap money would still be there. Rent growth did not materialize. Cap rates moved against them. Insurance in Florida moved violently against them.

When those loans hit maturity, the borrower has a gap. And what happens next is usually not a foreclosure. It is:

a maturity extension, sometimes with a fee and a rate cap purchase,
a loan modification that defers or capitalizes interest,
a rescue equity or preferred equity injection that dilutes the sponsor but avoids a default event,
or a negotiated paydown where the sponsor brings cash to right-size the loan.

Lenders do this because taking the keys means marking the asset, staffing up a special servicing function, and realizing a loss today rather than hoping for a better rate environment tomorrow. Extend and pretend is not a slur. It is a rational response to an uncertain rate path, and it is the single biggest reason commercial repricing takes years instead of quarters.

It also means the published data understates the stress. A loan that has been modified is performing. A property that has not traded has no new comp. The distress is real, it is just sitting in a file drawer rather than in a price index.

The distress that is already showing up

On the residential side, the numbers have already turned, and this is where I push back hardest on anyone telling you the consumer is fine.

FHA delinquencies reached 11.88% in the first quarter of 2026 per the Mortgage Bankers Association's National Delinquency Survey, up from 11.52% in the fourth quarter of 2025, which was itself the highest since early 2021. FHA foreclosure inventory hit its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2018.

Two things make that number more serious than it looks.

First, the timing is not an accident. Pandemic-era FHA loss mitigation options expired at the end of September 2025. For years, a borrower who missed payments could move the arrears to the back of the loan and repeat that process. That door closed. Several years of deferred distress is now working through the system at once, and the MBA notes that borrowers in required trial payment plans still count as delinquent until a permanent workout is in place.

Second, look at the spread. FHA delinquency at 11.88% against bank-booked single-family mortgages near 1.89% is a gap of roughly ten percentage points, wider than it was heading into 2008.

This matters for Florida specifically because FHA financing was heavily used to move new construction at peak pricing to buyers with thin down payments. Those are precisely the households with the least cushion when taxes and insurance reset. And Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, so every one of these files moves through a court. That adds quarters, sometimes years, to the timeline.

Slow is not the same as stopped.

Where my 31% to 42% number actually comes from

When I say I expect a correction of roughly 31% to 42% from the October 2022 peak in our market, people reasonably ask whether that is a feeling or a model. It is a model, and I want to explain the reasoning, because the conclusion is only as good as the framework underneath it.

Some background so you know where the framework comes from. Before I built a brokerage, I worked in real estate investment banking at a Wall Street bank, where I did lead underwriting work on institutional single-family rental portfolios. That meant underwriting the entities that built this asset class: American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, and FirstKey Homes, among others. My job was to answer, at scale and with real capital at risk, a single question: How much can I lend against this asset, and what is my downside risk?

That question is the backbone of the model.

Here is the logic, without the proprietary parts.

Start from the floor, not the ceiling. Most housing forecasts start from today's price and apply a growth or decline rate. I do the opposite. I ask: at what price does an all-cash institutional or private investor step in and buy these houses as rentals? That bid is the floor under the market, because when prices reach a level where the rental math works, capital shows up and stops the decline. Housing does not fall to zero. It falls to the investor bid.

Then underwrite the house the way an institution would. That means building a real cash flow, not a back-of-napkin cap rate:

Gross rent, marked to what the unit actually leases for today, not the 2022 pro forma.
Vacancy and credit loss, because no portfolio runs at 100% occupancy and some tenants do not pay.
Property taxes, and in Florida this is where models break. A non-homesteaded investor does not get the Save Our Homes assessment cap. On acquisition the property is reassessed at market value, and the annual cap is 10% rather than 3%. Investors get taxed harder, every year.
Insurance, which in Florida is not a rounding error. It is frequently the difference between a deal and a pass, and it has been rising while rents have flattened.
Maintenance and capital expenditure reserves, because a rental consumes roofs, HVAC systems, and turns. Institutions reserve for this. Amateur investors do not, which is why so many of them are struggling right now.
Property management, whether you pay a third party or absorb the cost yourself.
HOA and CDD, which in Northeast Florida new construction can be substantial and are frequently omitted from casual analyses.

Then apply a hurdle. Institutional capital does not buy for zero. It has a required return, and that return has to clear the cost of financing plus a risk premium. When the ten-year Treasury moves, that hurdle moves with it. This is the part most consumer-facing housing commentary misses entirely: when financing costs rise, the price an investor can pay falls, even if rents are perfectly stable. Cap rate expansion is not sentiment. It is arithmetic.

Then solve for price. Given today's rents, today's Florida insurance and tax load, realistic maintenance, and a hurdle that clears current financing costs, what purchase price produces enough monthly cash flow, in my model roughly $300 a month per house, for an investor to actually transact?

Run that, and the answer in our market lands about 31% to 42% below the October 2022 peak.

For scale: Northeast Florida prices fell roughly 36% during the global financial crisis.

My range brackets that, which some people find alarming and others find implausible. I would point out that it lands there not because I picked a scary number, but because the inputs, especially Florida insurance and non-homestead taxes, have deteriorated in ways that push the investor bid down hard.

What would make me wrong:

A meaningful drop in mortgage rates would lower the hurdle and lift the floor.
A genuine reversal in migration would restore the demand assumption.
Florida insurance costs stabilizing or falling would materially improve investor math. There are early signs of rate moderation, and if that holds it moves my numbers.
Wage growth outrunning price declines would close the affordability gap from the other direction.
Sustained construction of genuinely affordable product would change the mix rather than the price.

I am not certain. I am underwriting a range and telling you the assumptions. That is different from a prediction, and you should treat anyone who claims certainty about a five to ten year housing path with suspicion, including me.

"But this is not 2008"

The critics are right on the facts. Today's homeowner balance sheet is dramatically healthier than 2007:

Roughly 1.6% to 1.9% of mortgaged homes are underwater, versus something like 23% to 26% at the depths of the last crisis.
Homeowner equity is at record levels, in the neighborhood of $17 trillion.
More than 90% of outstanding mortgages are fixed rate, most locked at generational lows.
Homeowners are withdrawing equity at a fraction of the pace they did in 2005 and 2006.
Underwriting since Dodd-Frank has been genuinely conservative. The liar loans are gone.

All true. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and any housing bear who waves this away is not being straight with you.

Here is why I still think prices correct anyway.

Prices are set at the margin, not at the average.

This is the single most important concept, so let me be concrete. Suppose there are 1,000 homes in your community. In a given year, maybe 30 of them sell. Those 30 transactions set the appraised value of all 1,000. The 970 homeowners with 3% mortgages and enormous equity are not participating in price formation at all. They are not bidding. They are not offering. They are spectators.

Value is determined by the marginal buyer, meaning the most motivated qualified buyer available at a given moment, and the marginal seller, meaning the person who has to transact regardless of price.

So the question is not "are most homeowners fine?" They are. The question is: who is forced to sell, and who is able to buy?

On the forced-sell side, you do not need many. You need the ones with the classic triggers: death, divorce, disease, job loss, and relocation. Those happen at a fairly steady rate in any population. Add the 2022-2024 peak buyers with thin equity, the FHA cohort now running at 11.88% delinquency, the accidental landlords carrying negative monthly cash flow, and the builders who carry inventory on credit lines and cannot simply refuse to sell. A builder is a permanently motivated seller. That is the business model.

On the able-to-buy side, the pool has shrunk because payments, taxes, and insurance have all risen faster than wages.

A small number of motivated sellers meeting a shrunken buyer pool sets the comp. The comp sets the appraisal. The appraisal sets what the next buyer can borrow. That is the transmission mechanism, and it does not require a single homeowner with a 3% mortgage to sell anything.

The 2008 comparison is also misleading in a second way. In 2008, the shock was a credit event: the financing disappeared, defaults spiked, and prices fell fast and violently. Today's is an affordability event: financing exists, but the payment does not work for the marginal buyer. Credit events crash quickly. Affordability events grind.

The endpoint can be similar. The path looks nothing alike, which is precisely why people keep declaring the bear case dead.

So why has this not played out yet?

The answer is that real estate is one of the slowest, least liquid asset classes on earth, and price discovery takes years.

Look at the last cycle. The Case-Shiller national index peaked in 2006. It bottomed in 2012. Florida markets peaked around late 2006 and did not find a floor until 2011 or 2012. That was with a full-blown credit crisis, mass defaults, a banking system in genuine distress, and forced liquidations. Even under those conditions, the repricing took five to six years.

We are in a slower version of that process, and nearly every institutional force in the system is designed to slow it further:

Judicial foreclosure. Florida requires a court to process every foreclosure. That is quarters, often years, per file.
Loss mitigation and modifications. Distress gets restructured rather than realized. The FHA program change in October 2025 removed one of these buffers, which is exactly why delinquency is now surfacing in the data.
Extend and pretend on the commercial side. Maturity extensions and modifications keep multifamily assets from trading, which prevents new comps from printing.
Builder incentives instead of price cuts. The entire mechanism described above exists to keep the recorded price from falling. It works, on paper.
Sellers who refuse to capitulate. We see record rates of what I call rage quitting: a seller lists, gets showings but no offers, refuses the price reduction, and withdraws. A withdrawn listing never prints a low comp.
Lock-in. Ninety percent of mortgage holders have no rational reason to move. Low turnover means few transactions, and few transactions means slow price discovery.
Policy intervention. There is persistent political appetite to support housing demand, and every intervention on the demand side delays the adjustment.

Here is the thing to understand about all of these: they delay price discovery. They do not repeal it.

A withdrawn listing does not create a buyer. A modified loan does not create income. An incentive does not create equity for the buyer who accepted it. Each of these mechanisms buys time, and time is genuinely valuable if the underlying problem is temporary. If the underlying problem is that local wages cannot support local prices, time just moves the adjustment into the future and adds carrying costs along the way.

Which is why my timeline is years, not months. I said on the show that this is a five to seven year process and could stretch toward a decade. That is not hedging. It is the base case. The variable that would accelerate it is job losses, because unemployment converts patient sellers into forced sellers, and forced sellers set comps.

What I think should happen

My honest policy view: let it correct.

The Federal Reserve held rates too low for too long and created the conditions for a speculative run in housing. Then we responded to the resulting affordability crisis with a decade of programs designed to stimulate demand, which in a supply-constrained, price-inflated market largely converts into higher prices rather than more ownership. Down payment assistance, buydowns, and looser qualification are all demand-side tools applied to what is fundamentally a supply and price problem.

A correction is not a costless event. Falling prices mean real families lose real equity. Construction employment suffers. Local government revenue tied to property values tightens, which hits schools and services. People who bought in 2022 through nothing but bad luck of timing get hurt the worst, and they did nothing wrong.

I do not dismiss that. I weigh it against the alternative.

The alternative is what we have been doing: preventing adjustment, which preserves nominal prices while affordability keeps eroding underneath. That path transfers wealth from younger and poorer households to older and wealthier ones, locks a generation out of ownership, and builds a larger imbalance that eventually corrects anyway, from a higher altitude and with more accumulated debt attached.

The productive intervention is on the supply side, at the price points that are actually missing. In our market that means single-family homes around $200,000 to $300,000. That runs into land costs, impact fees, regulatory cost, and the plain fact that a builder makes several times more profit building expensive homes. Fix those constraints and you change the mix. Keep subsidizing demand and you just move the price.

Markets that are allowed to clear reprice once and then function. Markets that are prevented from clearing stay broken for a very long time. Japan spent decades demonstrating this.

What to actually do with all of this

If you are buying new construction: this is where the leverage is. In many new construction communities, total concessions in the range of 10% of price are realistic, and we have seen individual deals with $100,000 to $150,000 in combined incentives. That is a new construction statement. It does not transfer to resale, where a typical seller has neither the margin nor the balance sheet to do it.

Ask the builder to quote the deal both ways: as a price reduction and as an incentive package. Then compare. A rate buydown lowers your payment but leaves your basis at full price, and your basis is what you have to overcome at resale. If the builder will not cut price at all, understand that you are accepting resale risk in exchange for monthly relief, and size that trade deliberately.

If you are selling a resale home near an active builder community: you are not competing with the neighbors. Price against the builder's effective price, not their sticker price. Find out what incentives they are actually giving this month, because that is your real competition.

If you are renting: you have leverage you did not have two years ago, particularly in buildings that delivered recently and need occupancy to refinance. A tenant with good credit and a clean payment history is exactly who those properties need. Negotiate the renewal, not just the new lease.

If you are deciding between renting and buying: run it honestly. In our market, renting versus owning a comparable home can currently save meaningful money each month once you include taxes, insurance, and maintenance. If your horizon is two or three years, that gap is very hard to overcome. If you are planting for a decade, the current math matters much less, and you should not let a market call keep you out of a home you intend to keep.

Common questions

Is there a housing shortage in Florida?

Not in the overbuilt parts of the Sun Belt. Florida condo and townhouse inventory ran about 8.1 months in the second quarter of 2026, with condo-specific readings in parts of the state running considerably higher, against single-family closer to 4.5 months. Some regions, particularly in the Northeast United States, are genuinely supply constrained. Housing is a local market, not a national one.

What is shadow inventory in new construction?

It is committed supply that never reaches the MLS: completed standing homes, homes under construction, finished lots, platted future phases, and land under option. In many communities builders list only a model or two, so headline months of supply captures listed competition rather than committed competition.

Why do builders offer rate buydowns instead of cutting prices?

A price cut creates a lower recorded comparable sale that damages appraisals across the remaining phase, so builders prefer incentives that lower the payment while the sale still records at full price. NAHB reported 63% of builders using sales incentives in July 2026 against 37% cutting prices, and PulteGroup disclosed incentives at 10.9% of gross sales price in the first quarter of 2026.

Are rents falling in Jacksonville?

Metro average asking rent is roughly flat to modestly down, near $1,504 and about 0.4% lower year over year. The sharper signal is vacancy, which has climbed to roughly 12.2%, the highest among Florida's major metros, alongside widespread concessions such as free rent periods that reduce net effective rent more than advertised rent.

How high are FHA delinquencies in 2026?

FHA delinquencies reached 11.88% in the first quarter of 2026 per the Mortgage Bankers Association, up from 11.52% in the fourth quarter of 2025, with FHA foreclosure inventory at its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2018. Pandemic-era FHA loss mitigation options expired at the end of September 2025.

Will Florida home prices fall?

This is analysis and opinion, not a guarantee. Jon Brooks's investor-floor model, which solves for the price at which an all-cash investor earns enough monthly cash flow to transact after Florida taxes, insurance, maintenance, and vacancy, lands roughly 31% to 42% below the October 2022 peak in the Northeast Florida market, playing out over years rather than months.

Sources

About the author. Jon Brooks is the Co-Founder of Momentum Realty in Jacksonville, Florida. He previously worked in real estate investment banking, where he did underwriting work on institutional single-family rental portfolios including American Homes 4 Rent, Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, and FirstKey Homes.

This essay contains Jon Brooks's analysis, forecasts, and opinions, adapted from his interview on Market Insider. It is provided for general informational purposes only and is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, and it is not a representation about any specific property, community, or builder. Market projections are inherently uncertain. Figures cited are current as of publication and will change. Verify independently and consult a licensed professional about your situation. Momentum Realty is an Equal Housing Opportunity brokerage.