Hello my friends, and welcome to another episode of Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli, and today I wanted to bring back a friend and a property provider, a multi-city builder in Florida, and someone who used to live in.

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If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to Ask Marco: Exit Strategy for Turnkey Rentals


So Jim, welcome back to the show.

Marco. Thanks for having me. Always good to be back.

Well, it's great having you on. We've had some conversation before this recording about what we want to talk about and we thought we'd focus on Florida, the market trends in Florida, what's going on in terms of real estate investing in Florida new construction, maybe new construction compared to newly refurbished properties and all kinds of good stuff. So you and I don't really know what we're gonna title this episode yet, but we're gonna figure.

We always come up with some really good ahas it seems, when you and I start brainstorming back and forth.

Yes. Always, always, always. Well, good. Well, listen, let's let's kind of jump in. I'm not even sure where to start, but I think the most broad question I could probably ask you or, or bring up is about market trends. Like what are market trends that are happening within the state of Florida? And yes, we are talking about a state, so feel free to break it down as granular as you like, city by city or market by market, but what's going on in Florida?

Yeah, you know, Florida, again, we're the third most populous state in, in the country. So there are a lot of markets in Florida, but to try to give a 20,000 foot overview is there are still a ton of population growth happening here. In fact, I saw a stat last week that 60% of all growth in the US is between Texas and Florida. Just those two states. Wow. Which is monstrous. And obviously that's a great win to have at our back, and we're really happy about that. However, you know, as you and I always talk about, price point is very important. It's extremely important. So you hear about, you know, at least I have, there's, there's two things that I've heard about that I'm sure will hit him. We'll hit on insurance. Oh, you can't get insurance in Florida, which has not been the case for us.

And I'll explain why. But also, man, I heard things are softening or, or prices are too high. And I would agree with that in certain markets. And, and as you know Marco, when, when we started doing this, gosh, we've been working together over 10 years I, I didn't, I didn't do refurbished homes or now new construction for the last 10 years. I didn't do those in Miami. I didn't do 'em in Orlando. I didn't do 'em in Tampa. Not that those are bad markets, but we're always about that affordability index. Mm-Hmm. , you know, what is the, the average price compared to the average family income. And those markets, you know, with all the attention Florida got through the pandemic, they had the most growth and now the numbers are really out of whack. So it had such a rise and it, it doesn't fall in much, but we're talking a few percent.

But the numbers just don't work. I mean, for the model we want where we wanna get people into solid areas, solid properties and cash flow off the bat, that just doesn't happen unless you're putting a, a ridiculous amount down. So we're seeing that in those bigger markets and we're very glad as a builder, we never went there to build the land was too expensive, the numbers didn't work. But the second tier markets, we're still seeing quite quite a buzz, quite a push for needed inventory for needed, for needed building projects. Like you and I met a few months ago in Jacksonville for a coffee Jacksonville. We're still seeing we just did a deal with, with with the military base there where they are have a waiting list for housing. So they're actually doing a joint venture with us to guara...