Cape Coral lost more home value last quarter than any other large metro in the country. It was not alone. Six other Florida cities joined it in the bottom ten, a geographic clustering so stark it has turned the state into the epicenter of America’s uneven housing correction. The three non-Florida metros in that bottom ten were Austin, San Antonio, and New Orleans, all Sun Belt markets facing their own mix of oversupply and cooling demand, but none matched the depth or concentration of Florida’s losses.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index provides the foundation for these rankings. The FHFA’s repeat-sales measure, built from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage transactions, tracks price changes across 129 large metropolitan areas each quarter. Supplemental listing and pricing data from Redfin and Realtor.com help fill in the picture for the most recent months not yet covered by the federal index. Taken together, those sources show that home prices slipped in 39 of the 129 largest U.S. metropolitan areas during the most recent reporting period. But the severity of the drops in Cape Coral-Fort Myers, North Port-Sarasota, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Palm Bay-Melbourne, Deltona-Daytona Beach, Lakeland-Winter Haven, and Jacksonville sets Florida apart from every other state. The pandemic-era boom that made the Sunshine State synonymous with surging property values is now unwinding faster there than anywhere else.
A national cooldown with a Florida-sized hole in the middle
At the national level, the picture still looks like deceleration, not decline. The FHFA index showed U.S. home prices rising 2.2 percent year over year through the third quarter of 2025, with a quarter-over-quarter gain of just 0.2 percent. That thin positive number, though, hides a widening geographic split.
Markets in the Northeast and Midwest kept posting solid gains, supported by persistently tight inventory. Sun Belt metros that had surged during the remote-work migration of 2020 through 2022 moved in the opposite direction. And within the Sun Belt, Florida bore the heaviest losses…