Are Florida Condo Prices Going Down?

Statewide, and as of the most recent print, no. They’re flat.

Florida Realtors put out its July 2026 statewide numbers yesterday. The condo and townhouse median sale price held steady at $295,000, the same as July 2025. Over the same twelve months the single family median rose 3.7 percent to $425,000.

Flat is not the good news it sounds like. But if you own a Florida condo and you’ve spent the last month reading that your unit is in freefall, the state association’s own July data doesn’t say that.

What Did Florida’s July Numbers Actually Say?

Seven figures came out of that release.

Single family closed sales rose just over 5 percent from July 2025. Condo and townhouse sales climbed 11 percent. New pending single family sales rose nearly 2.5 percent, which is the twelfth straight month of year over year growth. Single family inventory fell almost 13.5 percent. Condo and townhouse inventory fell just under 13 percent. Single family median sale price, $425,000, up 3.7 percent. Condo and townhouse median sale price, $295,000, unchanged.

That’s the eleventh month in a row of year over year sales gains in both categories. Those are Florida Realtors’ own roundings and I’m quoting them the way they wrote them, because “just over 5 percent” is what the release says and turning it into 5.2 would be inventing precision nobody published.

Chief Economist Dr. Brad O’Connor’s read on it is that the sales gains happened without a rate advantage. His words: “we’re increasingly seeing evidence that buyers are returning to the market even without a major improvement in mortgage rates.”

Why Did Houses Go Up 3.7 Percent and Condos Go Up Nothing?

Because a buyer looking at your condo is underwriting the building, not just the unit.

Condo sales rose 11 percent in July, which is more than single family did. Inventory came down almost as fast. Both of those normally push a price up. The price didn’t move.

What’s sitting on the other side of that is the association. The budget, the reserve balance, the master insurance policy, whatever assessment is pending or rumored. A buyer prices that in, and so does their lender. I went through the lender half of this on Sunday, when Fannie Mae’s Full Review change took effect for buildings with eleven or more units. Short version: the fast lane for condo project approval closed on August 3, and the association’s paperwork now gets read on a conventional loan.

So the unit competes on price and the building competes on paperwork. Twelve months of buyer demand went into that market and came back out as volume instead of value.

Why Does Every Search Result Say Condo Prices Are Crashing?

Because most of what’s ranking is either a different year or a different part of Florida.

I searched this exact question before writing. Google returned an AI Overview that says yes, Florida condo prices are falling significantly, facing their sharpest correction since the 2008 crash. The sources it cites for that are Reddit threads. Underneath it, page one runs a Substack newsletter, two more Reddit threads, a couple of YouTube videos and a Realtor.com piece from November 2025 built on August 2025 data.

The metros doing the heavy lifting in those numbers are Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Naples, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Those are real declines in real places and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. They’re also not a statewide number, and they’re not Jacksonville.

Florida isn’t one condo market. A 2005 oceanfront tower in Southwest Florida carrying a structural assessment and a Northeast Florida garden condo two miles off the St. Johns are both “Florida condos” in a headline and almost nothing alike in a spreadsheet. When a national outlet blends them, the average lands somewhere neither owner lives.

A lot of the loudest numbers on that page are eleven or twelve months old. The July 2026 print is four days old.

Does Flat Actually Help Me if I’m Behind on a Condo?

Not much, and that’s what the “prices aren’t falling” framing hides.

Run it forward twelve months. Your unit is worth what it was worth. Your dues went up. Your share of the master insurance went up. If your building did a reserve study and funded it, an assessment showed up somewhere in there too. Every line moved except the one that would have given you room.

The statewide single family median moved 3.7 percent over the same twelve months. That’s a market number and not a promise about any one house, but at the median it’s roughly $15,000, and $15,000 is sometimes the whole distance between a sale that clears the loan and a sale that doesn’t. The condo median moved nothing.

Falling behind on a condo isn’t usually a story about the condo. It’s a job, a medical bill, a divorce, or an assessment that arrived the same month as something else. What flat prices do is take away the option of growing out of it. That’s a slower problem than a crash and it’s easier to not notice for a year.

What About Inventory Falling Almost 13 Percent?

That’s the one genuinely favorable thing in the release for somebody who needs to sell.

Fewer competing listings means a buyer working your price point has fewer places to go. For an ordinary sale that’s room to negotiate. For a short sale it matters more than that, because a short sale needs a buyer willing to wait out a lender’s approval process, and that buyer is a lot easier to find in a market where the alternative is nothing.

Inventory conditions move. That’s not a reason to hurry and I’m not telling anyone to. It’s a reason to know where you stand now rather than assuming next spring looks the same.

What Are My Options if the Numbers Don’t Reach?

There are six of them, and they cost different things.

Catch up and stay, if the money’s there. Ask your servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way if the price covers the loan and the costs. Ask the lender to take less than the balance through a short sale if it doesn’t. Hand the property back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side.

Which one fits depends on your equity, your income, your other debts and what your building’s paperwork looks like to an underwriter. Whether any lender agrees to any of it is that lender’s call on their own file, and I can’t tell you how yours would go.

What the credit and tax consequences are is a question for a CPA, and anything about your association’s documents is a question for a Florida community association attorney. I’m not either one.

In Other News

Florida’s attorney general rewrote the ballot language for the property tax amendment going to voters this November, after a Leon County judge ruled the original wording was misleading and that parts of it read “more akin to a political slogan.” The old title, “Save Our Homes From Excessive Property Taxes,” is gone. It’s now “Increased Homestead Exemption; Lower Cap on Increases in Non-Homesteaded Property Assessments.”

When Does the New Florida Homestead Exemption Actually Start?

2027 at the earliest, and only if it passes.

Nothing about this changes a 2026 tax bill. The amendment goes to voters on November 3, 2026, it needs at least 60 percent approval, and the first exemption increase applies to the 2027 tax year. The second one applies to 2028.

If you’re behind right now and you’ve heard property tax relief is coming, that’s the timeline. A vote, then a year.

What Would Actually Change?

Two things, on the non-school part of your bill.

The homestead exemption on non-school taxes would go to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, indexed to inflation after that. The existing exemption on school taxes stays where it is, so the school portion of your bill isn’t touched either way.

Separately, the annual cap on assessment increases for non-homestead property, meaning rentals and commercial buildings, would drop from 10 percent to 5 percent, again outside school district taxes.

An exemption comes off taxable value, not off the bill. Removing another $100,000 of taxable value saves you whatever your local millage rate charges on $100,000, and that rate is set by your county, your city and your special districts, so the dollar figure is different in Duval than it is in St. Johns.

What if I Just Moved to Florida?

You’d wait five years for the bigger exemption, and the cutoff date is genuinely unsettled right now.

The original ballot title set it at establishing residency after January 1, 2027. The rewritten language filed last week uses December 31, 2025, and qualifies the whole provision with the phrase “to the extent permitted by the U.S. Constitution.” One of the plaintiffs who forced the rewrite, former state Senator Jeff Brandes, has said the five-year wait may be unconstitutional.

So the number is five years, the starting line has been written two different ways in two different documents, and there’s an open legal question sitting on top of it. Plaintiffs have ten days from the rewrite to challenge the new language. Mail ballots print in late August.

If your plan involves that exemption, might wanna keep an eye on which version survives rather than budgeting off a date you read once.

I work Jacksonville, Florida, and distressed property is the bulk of what crosses my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you live.

If any of it’s useful, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.

Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.

Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.