This article discusses South Florida and Central Florida for now, but that might make its way to Jacksonville, so its worth watching and seeing how rents change in Florida:

South Floridians are already paying some of the highest rents in the nation when compared with wages. Add that to the high number of hourly and tip-dependent workers in tourism and restaurants, and the Miami-area ends as the third-most economically exposed cities in the U.S.

For the local multifamily market, that may spell trouble.

The study, San Francisco-based apartment search platform Apartment List, ranked the Miami metro area of Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties just behind Las Vegas and Orlando when it comes to the size of the population most at risk economically from the coronavirus crisis. The study defined high-risk populations as those with full-time careers in industries deemed “non-essential,” or service workers.

The study, released Monday, analyzed data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Department of Labor dating from 2017 to 2018 for the 50 largest metro areas in the country. It found that about 16% of the local population, or about 400,000 full-time employees whose average annual salaries are at $25,000 or below, in South Florida would be the most impacted.

“In the short term, you can imagine if everything returned to normal, there are protections for people’s housing with a moratorium on evictions,” said Rob Warnock, research associate at Apartment List. “But if people lose their jobs and those jobs aren’t there when the shelter-in-place lifts, then the moratoriums could be pushing off the inevitable.”

Locals who depend on the limited affordable housing options and below market-rate housing will be most negatively impacted, Warnock said. “There will be less people who can afford to move. That’s going to decrease the vacancy rate and increase rent on the vacancies that do exist.”

A record number of 74,021 Floridians filed for unemployment for the week ending March 21.

The top five high-risk metro areas with a large population deemed to work in “non-essential” industries includes: Las Angeles with 25.5% of its population, Orlando with 16%, Miami with 15.9%, Riverside with 14.3% and Oklahoma City with 14.1%.

The metro areas with the smallest population deemed to work in “non-essential” industries includes: Minneapolis and Boston with 9.6%, Detroit at 9.4%, Milwaukee with 8.4% and San Jose with 7.7%.

“Our estimates of populations at highest risk are likely to be conservative,” Warnock said, “because we didn’t include part-time workers and freelancers.”

Miami-Dade County halted construction inspections as of Saturday and any delay on residential construction may also become problematic, Warnock said. “Whether residential construction continues is important,” he said, “because cutting supply of new housing is only going to exacerbate the problem.”

One area of the real estate market expected to remain relatively untouched? “The luxury market,” Warnock said. “It’s the people at the higher end that are going to have the same resources.”

I have a Google Search setup for Florida Real Estate News to help me keep track of what is happening in our great state and the virus and the impact on Real Estate.

Jacksonville, Florida

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