Buying a house in Florida is even cheaper. Average housing prices dropped by 5% in the last 12 months, according to data from Zillow, one of the country’s main real estate websites.

The lower prices bring two messages. One is that acquiring real estate in the state, which has around 300.000 inhabitants of Brazilian origin, just became easier. At the same time, lower prices could signal a cooling down of the American economy. Throughout the country, real estate prices staggered in the last year, increasing by 0,2%.

Florida had a real estate boom in the last few years. Between 2020 and 2022, average house prices jumped from 256.000 to 392.000 dollars. The state attracted a lot of people form other regions in search of bigger and cheaper houses and for home office.

“During the pandemic, people overpaid for real estate because of high demand. Today, the market is adjusting itself”, says Lucio Santana, CEO of Royal Mortgage USA, an Orlando real estate financing company.

He evaluates that the adjustment is necessary, since real estate currently has values closer to what they are worth, and this makes it so that more people can purchase them. “When prices rise too much, a lot of people don’t qualify [for financing] through income evidence”, he says.

The reasons for the decrease in prices, however, are plenty. As companies started to demand that employees return to offices in other states, Florida lost some of its competitiveness. Besides, high interests rates adopted by the Fed to combat inflation has made housing financing more difficult.

To add insult to injury, a series of strong tornadoes hit Florida in the last few years, which increased the price of housing insurance, and and increase in anti-immigration feeling has had an even more pronounce effect in a state where around 30% of the population has Latin origin, according to the survey.

The state, which is one of the most visited by Brazilians in the US, is affected simultaneously by many of the main questions in the country, which creep ever closer to those that live or want to invest there.