Realtor.com published something recently that crystallizes a shift we’ve been watching build for a couple of years: East Coast buyer traffic to Miami has dropped sharply, with New York City home shoppers making up just 11% of non-local online searches for Miami listings this fall, down roughly two-thirds from where that number sat at the 2023 peak. That single data point tells a bigger story. Florida’s lost affordability advantage isn’t a prediction anymore, it’s showing up directly in buyer behavior, and it’s changing where a meaningful share of relocating East Coast households end up looking instead.
The Numbers Behind the Headline
The scale of the slowdown is hard to overstate. Florida’s net domestic migration, people moving in from other states minus those leaving, fell 93% from its 2022 peak, dropping from 310,892 that year to just 22,517 in the most recent full year of data. Florida was the single most popular migration destination in the country during the 2021-2022 surge. It has since fallen to eighth. Driver’s license exchange data from the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles tells a similar story: about 393,000 exchanges in the most recent year, down from the pandemic peak, though still above the pre-pandemic average.
Miami-Dade specifically led the entire state in domestic out-migration, losing nearly 73,000 residents to other counties and states in a single year. A lot of those people aren’t leaving Florida altogether, they’re moving to cheaper parts of the state, particularly Central Florida, or to Texas and North Carolina. But a significant share are leaving the state entirely, and that’s where Florida’s lost affordability advantage becomes a real opportunity for markets like ours.
Why the Math Stopped Working
It’s worth being specific about what actually broke down, because “Florida got expensive” undersells how dramatic the shift has been. Miami’s cost of living now ranks second in the country, behind only San Francisco, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s Regional Price Parities index, ahead of both New York and Los Angeles. Consumer prices in the Miami metro are up 36% since 2019, and home prices are up 79% over pre-pandemic levels.
The carrying costs are what really changed the calculation for middle-market buyers. Property taxes in Florida have risen 62% according to Attom data. Home insurance premiums rose roughly 75% between 2021 and 2025, driven by a wave of storm losses and an insurance market that’s struggled to stabilize. Statewide median HOA fees jumped about 68%, from $232 in 2022 to $390 in 2025, largely tied to new building-safety requirements passed after the 2021 Surfside condo collapse, which forced many associations to fund structural reserves they’d been deferring for years. None of these are one-time costs. They’re recurring, they compound, and they’re exactly the kind of expense that erodes a fixed-income retirement budget faster than a purchase price ever could.
The Split: Who’s Still Coming and Who Isn’t
Here’s what makes this more nuanced than a simple “Florida is losing people” story: Florida’s lost affordability advantage is hitting different income tiers in completely different ways. The ultra-wealthy are still arriving in force. Miami logged 361 transactions over $10 million in the most recent year, and it ended the year with the largest luxury inventory in the country, over 10,500 active million-dollar listings, ahead of even New York. Billionaires like Ken Griffin and Peter Thiel have relocated major operations to Brickell, bringing employees and capital with them, and the state’s lack of an income or estate tax remains a powerful draw for people at that level regardless of what insurance or HOA fees cost.
It’s the middle that’s genuinely pulling back. A United Way analysis found 56% of Miami-Dade households were living paycheck to paycheck in the most recent year, and the organization’s local CEO has pointed directly to rising costs pushing out essential workers, teachers, healthcare workers, firefighters, the kind of households that made up a large share of the pandemic-era relocation wave in the first place. One Miami broker summarized it about as plainly as it can be said: the middle market is softening while the top end keeps booming. For anyone who isn’t moving to Florida with a family office behind them, that’s the part of Florida’s lost affordability advantage that actually matters.
The age breakdown reinforces the same pattern from a different angle. Net migration among 20-to-29-year-olds into Florida turned negative starting in 2024, reversing the gains that age group posted during the pandemic years, and the surge of young families that drove so much of Florida’s growth from 2021 to 2023 has slowed considerably since. Retiree migration into the state is still positive, retirees remain a genuine driver of Florida’s housing market, but even that figure is running lower than it was in prior years. When the group with the most financial flexibility to absorb rising insurance and HOA costs is still the one pulling back somewhat, that says something real about how widely felt the affordability shift has become, not just at the entry-level end of the market.
Florida’s Lost Affordability Advantage Leaves Horry County Well Positioned
This is where the story gets directly relevant to us. Myrtle Beach was just named the single most moved-to city in the entire United States for 2025 by Pods, the moving and storage company, marking the third straight year the city has landed in their top 20. The broader Grand Strand has grown to nearly 400,000 residents, and Horry County added almost 16,000 people between 2023 and 2024 alone, with the Myrtle Beach-Conway-North Myrtle Beach metro ranking third nationally in growth rate.
We pulled South Carolina DMV license-transfer data covering the past three years to see exactly where that growth is coming from, and the pattern is telling. North Carolina sends the most new Horry County residents by volume, followed by New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Virginia. Florida actually ranks sixth among source states, averaging about 788 relocations to Horry County per year. That’s a meaningful number on its own, but what’s more interesting is what it represents: households that chose Florida during the earlier migration wave and are now making a second move, this time somewhere that doesn’t carry the same escalating insurance and HOA cost structure. Combined with the heavy flow of Northeastern buyers who were already comparing Florida and the Carolinas before ever booking a flight to either one, Horry County is positioned to absorb a real share of exactly the middle-market demand that’s backing away from South Florida right now.
What This Means If You’re Comparing the Two
If you’ve been assuming Florida was simply the default coastal retirement answer, Florida’s lost affordability advantage is exactly the reason to run the numbers again before assuming that’s still true. The headline comparison holds up well for us: a statewide Housing Cost Index roughly 20% below Florida’s, standard homeowners insurance along the Grand Strand typically running $2,500 to $4,500 a year against $6,000 to $7,100 for comparable Florida coverage, and none of the post-Surfside HOA reserve mandates that have driven Florida condo fees up so sharply over the past few years. It’s not that Florida stopped being a real place people want to live, clearly plenty still do. It’s that the specific financial advantage that made it the obvious move for a middle-income retiree a few years ago has largely disappeared, while that same advantage still holds here.
The retirement-specific math adds another layer worth spelling out. South Carolina exempts Social Security income from state taxes entirely and carries no estate or inheritance tax, so the headline cost-of-living gap isn’t offset by a hidden tax disadvantage the way it can be in some lower-cost states. Property tax growth has also stayed far more restrained here than the 62% increase Florida has seen, which matters enormously for anyone budgeting a fixed retirement income over a 20- or 30-year horizon rather than just comparing today’s purchase price.
Browsing what’s currently available across Myrtle Beach is a good way to see what a comparable budget actually buys along this stretch of coastline right now. If you’ve been quietly rethinking a Florida plan after watching your insurance renewal or HOA notice climb again this year, reach out to our team and we’ll walk through how the numbers actually compare for your specific situation.