Two years ago, a three-bedroom ranch in Tampa’s Seminole Heights neighborhood might have drawn a dozen offers and sold above $400,000. Today, similar homes in the same zip code are closing below $380,000, sometimes after weeks on the market. Meanwhile, in Detroit’s Grandmont-Rosedale corridor, bungalows that traded for $120,000 in 2023 are now listing north of $140,000 and moving fast.
These are not outliers. They reflect a measurable fracture running through the American housing market, one that is pushing Sun Belt home values downward while lifting prices in industrial cities that spent decades being written off.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s House Price Index, which tracks repeat sales of the same properties over time, shows Florida home prices falling 5.1% year over year in its most recent quarterly release. Texas declined 2.4% over the same period. At the same time, several Rust Belt and Great Lakes metros posted gains well above the national average. The divergence is sharp enough that researchers at the FHFA have flagged it as one of the widest regional gaps the index has recorded since tracking began.
The Sun Belt cooldown, by the numbers
Florida’s decline is not confined to one city. Tampa, Jacksonville, and parts of Orlando have all seen prices soften in FHFA metro-level data. The state absorbed an enormous wave of pandemic-era migration between 2020 and 2023, with remote workers and retirees flooding in and pushing prices up by double digits year after year. That demand has cooled, and the math is catching up…