This NEW Migration Trend is RESHAPING Florida Forever

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]Florida is becoming a club, and chances are you're not in it. And what do I mean by that? Well, I mean that things are changing very rapidly here. A lot of people moved to Florida during the pandemic boom because we were open. You could actually live your life here without being controlled, and people loved it. And the cost of living here was still relatively low. But, times are changing, and that simply is just no longer the case. The thing is, Florida has no income tax, which makes it very attractive to live here the more money that you make. And what's happening is a lot of states have been raising their taxes specifically on the wealthy, the people who would benefit from not having that state income tax the most. And a lot of those people have been moving here. And in the past, Florida was affordable if you were a teacher or a nurse or worked in hospitality, things like that. I worked in hospitality, guys. When I first moved here, I worked at a restaurant, and I had no problem living by myself, paying all of my bills, and still having a decent amount of money left over each month. And on top of that, I lived in an oceanfront one-bedroom condo with a partial ocean view, parking space, balcony. Like, those days are basically over because we have had so many people move into Florida, and a lot of them are people with money. And that has really changed the dynamic of the state and who can afford to live here and who can't.

[00:01:37]Florida actually gained more wealthy residents from high-earning transplants than any other state in 2023, according to IRS data. And the Sunshine State gained about $20.65 billion in annual adjusted gross income from tax filers who moved here from another US state, according to realtor.com. Now, think about that, guys, an extra $20 of income, people moving in here. That is insane. That is a crazy amount of money. It's reported that the average income of people who moved to Florida from another state was $122,530, which is the highest among all US states. And that's just the average income, you know? When you look at the real numbers of what people actually earn, it can be substantially higher than that. Now, this doesn't mean that Florida's not going through a housing crisis right now, because it absolutely is, you know, because the media will take a story like this and say, "Well, look, you know, Florida is still booming because all the rich people are moving here. Therefore, the housing market isn't going to crash." That is wrong, guys. It's actually already crashing right now. Every single county throughout the entire state of Florida has gone negative year-over-year in terms of median sales prices, which means prices are actively coming down and have been for a while. How much they're going to come down though, really depends a lot on the different areas and where wealthy people actually move to. One place they're definitely moving to is right here in Miami and Miami Beach, Florida, where I do live.

[00:03:17]You can see this house here was sold back in 2024 for 1.4 million. They probably demolished it and built this brand new house. And now they're asking about $4 million for this house, although it's been listed since January this year with no price reductions and obviously no buyers. But homes like that are becoming the norm. You know, that's probably what this house used to look like. You can see this house here right next door to that house is old, in desperate need of lots of repairs, and people typically will buy these houses, tear them down, and then build what I just showed you. And those type of new construction homes, which you're going to be able to see all along South Shore Drive, where I'm walking here in Miami Beach today, is becoming the new standard. Like, it's just normal now to tear down a lot of these old houses and build these new houses for all of the wealthy new residents moving in. And these houses do take a very long time to sell. Sometimes they're sitting on the market for years, but eventually someone will buy it. And so, what's happening is entire income groups are being pushed out of the state, guys. I have seen countless stories online talking about people that have lived here forever and are now leaving the state or moving to more affordable pockets of the state in order to try to keep up with the cost of living. But, the problem is that the people who are leaving are the ones who are the base of the entire Florida state economy. Like, for example, people who work in the restaurants, in the hospitality, like in Disney World, and all of the tourist resorts, and all of the hotel resorts, and all of the hospitals, all of the teachers, everybody who's sort of like in that middle class, are the ones who are leaving. And if it's only rich people moving in, who is going to take their place, you know? If you have somebody moving in here that already has a great income and a nice job, they're not going to be the ones applying to take that job, right? And so, this has a complete domino effect on the entire state economy in a negative way, in the sense that if they want to fill those jobs, they're going to have to pay people more, right? They're going to have to give people more money to work those jobs to make it worth it. So, that way the people who are currently working them will stay, or to attract new people who can come in and actually fill that position and afford to live in the area.

[00:05:46]This economic shift here is completely reshaping who can afford to live in Florida and who can't. And to just put in the perspective of how much money's moving in here, here's another stat from the IRS. Between 2019 and 2023, Florida absorbed a net $137 billion in income, while at the same time, states like California lost $91 billion in income, and New York lost $76 billion in income.

[00:06:15]But let me tell you why that doesn't just make housing more expensive everywhere. It doesn't mean that prices in Florida are going to be exploding, guys, because those people who move in here, a lot of them, they buy these houses like this, you know? Like this one being built over here, brand new, that's probably going to be a 10 or 15-million-dollar house on the water.

[00:06:35]That's what many of these people are buying. They're not buying houses in the middle of middle-class neighborhoods for three, four hundred thousand dollars.

[00:06:43]They're not buying those. Although, it does have a little bit of a trickle effect because it pushes more people down into those categories of housing, which does create more competition. But for now, there's still way too many homes for sale in the state of Florida compared to the amount of demand. So, over the next few years, it's going to continue to be a pretty good time to buy a home in Florida if that's something you've been wanting to do. In Miami-Dade County alone here, where I'm at, the median annual single-family home prices by 10.1% just in 2020, and it went up another 23% in 2021, which is an all-time high in terms of the pace of the increases. And then it rose another 11.1% in 2022. We also saw a record surge in the amount of million-dollar homes in Miami-Dade County from 8% in 2019 to 28% in Q1 of this year. And in Palm Beach County now, nearly 1/3 of homes are valued at at least $1 million.

[00:07:46]And that's the case in this neighborhood, too, guys. Like, it used to be that you could buy one of these houses in this neighborhood probably about 10 years ago, almost all of the houses on this side of the street were right around a million dollars. Some of them were a little more, you know, 1.2, 1.5 if it was really nice and remodeled like something like this. But now, they're all asking three, four million dollars, you know, and double or triple what they were 10 years ago. And on this side of the street, forget it. The all of these houses are waterfront.

[00:08:18]Everything over here is like a minimum of 10 million and up. It's just absolutely crazy what has happened with prices here. And the other thing that has pushed a lot of locals out and people who have wanted to become home buyers here over the last few years is the sheer amount of cash purchases, okay? About 39% of Miami home purchases and 48% of West Palm Beach purchases were all cash in recent years. And when you're talking luxury homes, something like this over here, the shares are even higher. And 82% of Miami condo sales are now above $1 million as of 2025.

[00:08:58]So, that is insane. You know, like, as much as I complain about all the costs associated with owning my condo, I'm 100% confident that within the next decade, if I ever want to sell my condo, once they're done doing all the renovations at my building, I'm easily going to be able to get over a million dollars for my condo as well. And I paid about half of that. So, I'll be able to get double for than what I paid for it in a 10- or 15-year time frame, which is just absolutely nuts. That's if I decide to sell it.

[00:09:39]The part of the reason why Florida is in trouble and it's essentially losing its middle class is because the cost burden to own a home or even rent something here has gone well over 30% of someone's average income and that just doesn't work mathematically. Statewide, the median single family home price is about $420,000 and the median household income is 77,000 which means that the price to income ratio is 5.4. Historically, when homes were affordable, that ratio was about three. So, we are at almost double what home affordability ratios should be in order for people to actually live comfortably here. And that's why I said earlier, Florida has become a club and chances are you're not in it because most people can't afford that anymore.

[00:10:31]This is just way too much of a cost burden for the average person that lives here and the state's average annual home insurance premium now is at $8,300 a year. Think about that. It's already a bad enough. It's already expensive enough just to buy the house and then you're looking at typically $8,300 a year in homeowners insurance. Now, is everybody paying that? No. I've heard from many people who watch my channel in Florida who have said that, you know, my insurance is only, you know, $3,000 a year or $4,000 a year, half of this amount. And that is definitely possible, especially if you have a new construction home or you're more inland, things like that. But to put into perspective, that's 181% above the national average according to Insurify. And once premiums start consuming 5% or more of household income, buyers start walking away. This is one of the reasons why you have so so houses for sale here right now cuz people look at these prices and these homes like I can't afford this. But a lot of these homes that have been sitting on the market for a long time are seeing major price reductions. I've shown you several of them here on my channel and it's becoming very, very common. And nowhere in Florida has been hit as hard with this exodus as right here in South Florida, guys. There have been a ton of people leaving South Florida over the past few years. Miami has been losing population for the past couple years as well and they move to more affordable areas. Like this is something I was even considering doing for a while. You know, I was thinking about moving to northern Florida or somewhere in central Florida. I actually decided not to because number one, my wife and I like where we live and number two, you know, we have set up a situation where we can afford to be here. And also now that we're just here for the winter months, which is the best time to be in Florida, it's actually better to be in South Florida because the winters are more mild down here and in northern Florida it can just get downright cold. You know, it snowed like two or three times in northern Florida this past winter and a lot of days got down into the 30s and 40s. So that's just a little too cold for what we want.

[00:12:50]And a lot of other people are just leaving the state altogether. They're moving to Georgia, they're moving to the Carolinas, they're moving to Tennessee and Texas. They're also moving to Alabama, different southern states where it's more affordable to live. As of November of 2025, nearly half of Floridians who were surveyed said that they have considered leaving the state because of the cost of living and 90% said they were concerned about inflation and 80% said they were concerned about housing expenses.