On the other hand, there are signs that Florida’s hot real estate market has cooled. Single-family home sales fell 12% in September compared to the same period a year earlier. But interest rates, rising home prices and skyrocketing insurance costs probably played a bigger role than the recent hurricanes.

“Florida is recovering a lot faster than you think,” said Brad O’Connor, chief economist at Florida Realtors.

What happens after a storm?

Studies of hurricanes along the Gulf Coast have shown that any outflow migration tends to be short-lived, and if people do leave, it’s usually a short-distance movement, such as from a barrier island to the mainland. Older people with more financial resources are more likely to return to devastated communities.

When it comes to the housing market, there may be an initial supply shock as homeowners wait for reimbursement from insurance companies to repair their homes or sell them.

But in the three years after a hurricane, home prices in areas of Florida that were hit by one average 5 percent higher than in other parts of the state because of lower supply. according to a study of the impact of hurricanes on the Florida real estate market from 2000 to 2016. New owners tend to be wealthier than previous owners because wealthier buyers can absorb price increases.

Other factors that determine how quickly communities recover include whether homes have been insured, the speed of insurance reimbursement, and whether there are enough construction workers. Because of stricter building codes implemented in the years after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida in 1992, newer homes withstand hurricanes better than older ones, O’Connor said.

“If a property is blighted and uninsured and the owner says, ‘I don’t want to deal with it,’ there are always people willing to pick up that property because it’s valuable land,” he said. “People are building new homes to the new codes and the impact of hurricanes is less.”

Short term and long term

Recent storms provide examples of what happens to communities, both in the short and long term.

In Lee County, where Fort Myers is located, Hurricane Ian arrived two years ago in what had been one of the fastest-growing areas in the United States. Population growth slowed afterward to 1.5 percent from 4.4 percent before the storm. The number of households fell from about 340,000 to about 326,000, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

In 2019, three-quarters of all United Van Lines truck movements occurred in Lee County and one-quarter were outbound, but that dropped to two-thirds inbound and one-third outbound in 2023 to 2024, it said company for The Associated Press.