Florida SFR Investment Report - March 2024
Rent growth changes, investor activity, and more
Executive Summary
Across Florida, rent growth accelerated rapidly in 2021, reaching over 12% year-over-year in many metro areas; that trend has since reversed, with rent growth slowing and even going negative in a handful of metros.
While inventory has come roaring back more than doubling from lows in early 2022, it still remains below pre-Covid levels for most markets in the state.
Florida has been a popular state for large SFR operators, with an estimated 100,000+ single-family homes in the state owned by institutional investors.
Investor acquisitions continue to outpace investor dispositions, although total investor transaction volume is down.
At the end of the article, a CSV showing detailed information about investor ownership in Florida for properties purchased during 2023 is available.
Data Overview
At SFR Analytics, we leverage nationwide deed and assessor data to track the single family rental market. To generate this analysis, we’ve:
Identified and reconciled the entities that SFR investors purchase properties under to have a complete picture of acquisition and disposition activity.
Cleaned and processed historical rental listings data to generate annualized growth rates based on paired listings.
Identified “Same Store” properties that have been listed and removed multiple times over the period studied.
Investors are defined as buyers who used a private lender or corporate buyers excluding trusts. We think this is the best proxy, but will underestimate investment activity from non-corporate cash buyers.
Analysis & Results
Monthly Inventory
Inventory levels are still below pre-Covid numbers for most regions, though in recent months Tampa has eclipsed January 2020 levels while Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach have nearly returned to pre-Covid levels.
After bottoming out in early 2022, inventory has more than doubled for all regions.
Florida as a whole is seeing the largest spike in active listings compared to other regions across the country.
Investor Acquisitions
Investor purchase activity dropped sharply in March 2020 through June 2020 before roaring back to reach highs in early 2022.
Since early 2022, activity has since fallen significantly, with rising interest rates changing the math on prospective purchases. Both flipping activity and new rental acquisitions are down significantly.
While transactions are muted, many of the large players are still active. Pretium and Amherst have both bought dozens of homes YTD, Opendoor has over 250 acquisitions YTD, and other large players like New Western, Net Worth, and Offerpad are buying between dozens and 100s of homes.
Investor Dispositions
Sale activity peaked in early-2022 and like investor acquisitions has been falling since. In Q1-Q2 of 2023, investor dispositions outpaced investor acquisitions during some months, but has since rebounded with investor acquisitions continuing to outpace investor dispositions.
Many of these dispositions are “natural dispositions” - often flippers exiting a property and selling it back to an end user. These properties often cycle from acquisition to disposition in 6-12 months.
In Florida, it’s common to see ~50% of investor acquisitions being purchased from another investor exiting a property. These include landlord-to-landlord purchases as well as flipper-to-landlord purchases.
Rent Growth by MSA
Rent growth has slowed significantly across all MSAs within Florida.
As highlighted in our recent piece Single Family Residential Rental Trends, many of the MSAs that have experienced negative year-over-year rent growth are located in Florida.
Institutional Ownership
Institutional investors have a heavy presence throughout Florida. We estimate that over 100,000 single-family properties in Florida are owned by institutional investors.
As of Q4 2023, public SFR REITs owned the following in Florida:
Invitation Homes: 26,182
American Homes 4 Rent: 8,001 homes
Tricon: 5,806 homes
Other large holders include private SFR funds like Pretium, with over 20,000 homes held, and First Key Homes, with over 10,000 homes held.
Investor Ownership Details
While purchase volume is down from the heights of 2021, investors are still active in making acquisitions in the state of Florida.
A full list of properties purchased by investors in the Tampa and Jacksonville metros during 2023 is available below:
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