Florida - Monday December 12, 2022: Rents across Florida are beginning to moderate, according to a Rental Housing Survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing. But that follows a year in which Florida experienced the largest rent increases in the nation.
After a surge in Florida rent prices over the past few years rental costs finally begun to ease according to Jon Leckie, a researcher with Rent.com who has analyzed the federal data. “Prices in Florida are starting to moderate. State prices peaked in May of 2022. They’re down about three-and-a-half percent since then. And monthly changes have also been down one or two percent each of the last two months," said Leckie.
But Leckie points out that Florida rents are falling from historic highs. The average rental costs in Florida, he says, rose above two-thousand two hundred monthly this year, higher than in any other state. “The median rent in Florida is $2,209, that’s up twenty-three percent year-over-year, and that was the largest year-over-year change we saw in our study.”
Leckie expects rental costs to moderate through the fall and winter, but it’s unlikely they’ll ever drop to where they were before the pandemic. “I’ve heard some people describe it as we’ve hit a ceiling on rent prices and that’s why they’re moderating. I think of it as we’ve seen a new floor. We’ve gone up a level now. And that base level is elevated before what it was before the pandemic. I don’t think we’re going to see that level drop too significantly, and certainly not to the level of returning to where we were before the pandemic.”