Ballooning home insurance costs and the perennial threat of violent storms hit Tampa Bay housing market hard
4 min
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—Kellen Driscoll bought his home here in 2019, settling in the coastal enclave of Shore Acres. It flooded for the first time four years ago after tropical storm Eta dumped more than 3 feet of water.
Hoping it was a fluke, Driscoll tore out the affected drywall and started fresh. After all, the four-bedroom home built in 1960 had no flood history.
But then it happened again, and again. Like many others in the community, he put his home up for sale in the spring of this year. After seeing little interest, he cut the asking price.
On Friday, Hurricane Helene deposited more than 6 feet of storm surge in the neighbourhood. The rushing waters ripped the “For Sale” sign off his front lawn, and etched a waterline that reached halfway up his front door, just underneath the doorbell. He reduced the asking price for a fifth time.
“We flooded here four times in the last four years,” said Driscoll, as he threw his television sets, furniture, appliances and other belongings to the curb. “I’m just hoping I can sell the house. It’s a good neighbourhood for sure, but dealing with the floods is horrible.”
In the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, which includes St. Petersburg, a real-estate boom nearly doubled median home values from 2018 to June of this year, according to Redfin data. Young people flocked to the region, looking for a coastal lifestyle at a relatively affordable price.
The Tampa Bay metro area was the fifth most popular relocation destination in the country, according to an analysis by Redfin last year. The population has soared to more than three million.
But as Shore Acres’s young residents sorted through the storm’s wreckage, only one thing was on their minds: selling.
Ballooning home insurance costs and the perennial threat of violent storms are starting to undermine housing markets throughout much of the state. But in few places has the turnaround been more dramatic than in low-lying communities up and down the coast of Florida that frequently flood.
The Tampa Bay housing market had been softening even before Helene struck. While prices have been flat, the area experienced a 58% increase in supply in August compared with a year ago, and a 10% decrease in demand, according to Parcl Labs, a real-estate data and analytics firm.
About half the homes listed for sale in Tampa experienced price reductions as of Sept. 9, the third highest share of all U.S. major metropolitan areas.
“Tampa was already heading in this direction before the hurricane hit,” said Jason Lewris, co-founder of Parcl Labs. “This hurricane may compound the market dynamics that have been occurring there over the last few months.”
While Tampa escaped a direct hit from the eye of the hurricane, it was the worst storm to hit the area in a century. The hurricane also plowed into landlocked towns well north, causing heavy damage in the Carolinas where people were just beginning to absorb the scope of ruin.
Bradley Tennant’s home flooded last year. But to avoid all the competition, he was waiting a year to put it up for sale.
“We saw the glut of homes for sale in the spring and thought, ‘What are the chances it’ll hit again the next year?’” said Tennant, as he cleared out the soaked contents of his waterfront home. “We went 50 years without a storm that flooded the house. So we thought, let’s roll the dice.”
While he paid around $350,000 for the house about seven years ago, Tennant says he received offers as high as $800,000 during the height of the market—before last year’s storm hit. Now he’s hoping to sell as soon as he’s able to renovate.
The area’s affordability, once a large part of its appeal, is also waning as insurance premiums soar. Jacob McFadden was paying $880 a year to insure his home when he bought it in 2020. That amount has since almost quadrupled, to $3,300.
Premiums will likely increase again now. Property damage from last week’s Category 4 storm could be as high as $26 billion, according to estimates from Moody’s Analytics.
“I don’t know how much longer I’m going to do this waterfront living,” McFadden said, standing in front of his home with a wheelbarrow and his home’s contents scattered around the front yard. “This may be the end.”
Dustin Pentz bought his home 10 years ago, and was one of the lucky few to avoid flooding. That is until Hurricane Helene. When police blocked his car from entering the neighbourhood, he paddleboarded his way home to assess the damage.
His fridge was knocked over, and the water reached up as high as his mattress. Unfortunately, his flood insurance doesn’t cover the contents of his home. A tree in his backyard fell over and hit the corner of his roof, but he was unsure that the damage would hit his $8,500 wind deductible.
“This neighbourhood’s amazing, great schools. But no one wants to deal with this all the time,” said Pentz. “It sucks because no one wants to live here anymore. There are so many houses for sale and no one’s buying.”
Down the street, Domonique Tomlinson and her husband, Leon Tomlinson, filed a claim for items they lost in last year’s flood. They didn’t want to go through the headache of filing another claim for the contents of their home this year, with a separate $5,000 deductible.
Two days before Hurricane Helene hit, they rented a moving van to haul many of their belongings to a storage unit. She bought her home four years ago for around $199,000. Because property values have increased so much in her area, she hopes to break even. But now she says she’s not so sure.
Tomlinson, who is a teacher, and her husband, who works as a manager at a grocery store, worry that people like them will be priced out of the area because they can’t afford the preventive measures and insurance.
“Basically the only people that are going to be able to live back here are rich people who can build up,” she said.
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Kit Braden, an executive at French beauty empire L’Occitane, has spent every winter for the past 13 years at the stone vacation home.
2 min
A historic Barbados estate with a 300-year-old villa and 11 acres overlooking the Caribbean Sea is now for sale with a guide price of $22.5 million.
The seller is Kit Braden, chairman of the U.K. branch of French beauty empire L’Occitane Group, whose family has spent every winter for the last 13 years at the island property, known as Fustic Estate.
“It’s very much a family house,” Braden said. “We love having a lot of people there. It’s a collection point to keep everyone together.”
The main villa dates to 1712, though it’s been reimagined and expanded substantially over the years.
It spans 13,000 square feet and features seven en suite bedrooms across three wings, as well as expansive verandas, stone courtyards and rows of louvered doors in gay Caribbean pastels.
In the 1970s, when the home was owned by Charles Graves—brother of British poet Robert Graves—it was reimagined by stage designer Oliver Messel, one of the foremost theater designers of the last century. Messel expanded the home, added a lagoon pool with a natural waterfall and other theatrical features, according to Braden.
“The whole place is a little bit magical,” he said.
The home sits about 350 feet above the water, and surrounded by lush gardens that slope towards the water.
“We look down through our garden—which is about 12 acres of tropical gardens and palm trees and wonderful old mahogany trees—onto the Caribbean,” Braden said.
He and his wife first saw the property on New Year’s Eve 2013, during a quick trip from where they were staying in Grenada.
The couple spent an hour walking the perimeter, some of it still untouched jungle, in the pouring rain.
“By the time we got back, I had fallen in love with it,” Braden said.
His wife, however, wasn’t so sure. But in Braden’s telling, a second visit in sunnier weather with two of their children brought her around.
“She had to be talked into that it was a jolly good idea; now she absolutely loves it,” he said.
When they bought the property, the edge that runs along the waterfront was a jungle, so they cleared the ridge and transformed it into gardens.
They also bought an additional sea-level parcel with two beach cottages, giving the property direct access to the water and the town below via a five-minute walk.
The property also has a 15-person staff, a reflecting pond, an outdoor pavilion suitable for yoga and a commercial grade kitchen that can serve more than 100 guests, according to a brochure from Knight Frank, which posted the listing in March. They did not provide further comment.
For Braden, the property is special because of its natural beauty, its proximity to the town of Saint Lucy and its history—which dates way way back to when the island of Barbados was first formed via tectonic activity.
“It was basically tectonic plates that collided about a million years ago so the seabed is the top of the hill,” Braden said. “We’re on coral rock.”
As a result, Fustic Estate includes an extensive network of caves that were likely used by the Arawaks, a Venezuelan fishing tribe that followed the fish to these islands about a thousand years ago.
“If the fish were good they’d camp here,” Braden said. “There’s evidence that they stayed there in those caves, they lived there in good winters.”
Now it’s someone else’s turn to live on the land shared by Arawaks, the plantation owners of 1712, Charles Graves and the Braden brood.
