Should You Sell Your Florida Apartment Building in 2026?

If you own a stabilized Florida apartment building and you've been waiting for 2022 prices to come back, I'm going to save you some time. They're not coming back, and the longer you price your building like they are, the more it costs you. That's the short answer. The rest of this post is me showing you the math, because I'd never ask you to take my word for anything.

And look, I like this business. I've been brokering Florida multifamily since 2013, and most of my week is spent on the phone with owners talking through exactly this question. So let me walk you through it the same way I would if we were on a call.

What actually happened to the market

Let's rewind, because the story matters.

From 2013 to 2019, this was a normal business. Debt was 4 to 5 percent, insurance was cheap, rents grew a little every year, and buildings traded at prices that made sense against their income.

Then 2020 through 2022 happened. Debt went under 3 percent. Rent growth peaked at 15 percent a year in early 2022, the fastest ever recorded. Every buyer in America wanted a Florida apartment building, cap rates compressed to all-time lows, and owners pushed rents as hard as the market would take them. Prices detached from anything I could underwrite. I know because I was underwriting them.

Here's the part most owners haven't fully absorbed. That market wasn't the new normal. It was the anomaly. And it's over.

Since 2022, national apartment rents actually fell, down 3.4 percent in 2024 and another 0.7 percent in 2025. That's the first time rents declined since the financial crisis. Florida is running about 3 percent below last year. Tampa's vacancy hit 10.7 percent this spring, a record. Jacksonville is at 12.2 percent, the most oversupplied market in the state.

The tenant is tapped out

This is the piece I think about most, and almost nobody in my industry says it out loud.

Between 2001 and 2024, rents rose 30 percent in real terms. Renter wages rose 9 percent. The average lower-income renter household now has about $210 a month left after paying rent. Two hundred and ten dollars. For food, gas, a flat tire, everything.

So when an offering memorandum shows "pro forma rents" $200 above what tenants are paying today, my question is always the same. Who exactly is paying that? Your tenants aren't holding out on you. They're broke. Rent growth in most of Florida isn't being held back by sentiment or by soft marketing. It's being held back by arithmetic.

Can rents grow again? Sure, eventually. Construction starts are down about 40 percent from the peak, deliveries are falling fast, and by late 2027 the oversupply in Tampa and Jacksonville should be absorbed. I'm not a doom guy. But notice what that means for you as an owner: the recovery, when it comes, arrives at today's expense structure. Which brings me to the ugly part.

Your expenses repriced. Permanently.

In 2013 I quoted apartment insurance at $400 a unit per year. By 2020 it was $700 or $800. Today I use $1,200 a unit, and I've seen worse. Nothing about your building changed. The cost of owning it in Florida changed, and it's not going back.

On a 16-unit building, that's roughly $13,000 a year in new expense compared to the market everyone's still anchored to. At a 7.5 percent cap rate, $13,000 of lost income is about $170,000 of lost value. One line item.

Property taxes do the same thing the moment you sell, because the county reassesses at roughly 80 percent of the sale price times the millage rate. Buyers who underwrite honestly (and the good ones do) price that in too.

So here's the squeeze in one sentence: rents are flat because tenants can't pay more, while insurance and taxes keep climbing, and the difference comes straight out of your NOI, which is the number your building's value is built on.

"But buildings are still selling"

They are. This surprises people when I say it, so let me give you the actual numbers.

Apartment sales volume hit $165.5 billion in 2025, up 9 percent from the year before. Volume has grown for 14 straight months. A recent survey found 87 percent of investors plan to expand their multifamily holdings this year. There is real money out there, and it wants Florida deals.

But here's the detail that matters: while volume rose 9 percent, prices still fell 1.3 percent. They fell 3 percent the year before that.

Read those two facts together, because they tell you exactly what's happening. Buyers didn't come back to pay 2022 prices. Buyers came back because sellers finally started accepting 2026 prices. The market is clearing at the reset level. That's what a repricing looks like from the inside. Not a crash, not a freeze. Just a market quietly agreeing that the old number was wrong.

What the interest rate story really means for you

Everyone asks me about the Fed, so let's do this quickly.

Yes, the Fed has been cutting. The funds rate is down to 3.5 to 3.75 percent, and they're projecting more cuts. That helps at the margin. But your buyer's mortgage isn't priced off the Fed funds rate. It's priced off the 10-year Treasury, which is stuck around 4 percent because inflation is still sticky at 2.8 percent. The day the Fed cut in September, the 5-year Treasury actually went up.

So commercial debt is sitting around 6 percent, maybe drifting toward the mid 5s. Compare that to the owner who borrowed at 4.25 percent in 2021 and has a balloon coming due. When that loan resets, the new payment lands on today's insurance bill and today's tax bill, and the cushion evaporates. I talk to owners in exactly this position every month. Some of them have time. Some of them are about a year from a very uncomfortable conversation with their lender.

If that's you, the question isn't really "should I sell." It's "would I rather choose my timing or have my loan choose it for me."

So who should actually sell?

Honestly, not everyone. Let me split it up the way I do on the phone.

You should probably hold if you're in a strong submarket, your debt is fixed for another five-plus years at a good rate, your insurance is quoted current and your NOI still cushions the payment comfortably. The supply drought after 2027 will eventually reward you. Miami owners, you're in a different market entirely, with 7 percent vacancy and rents still growing. This post is mostly not about you.

You should seriously look at selling if any of these sound familiar. You've owned for five or more years and you're sitting on real equity from a low basis. You're tired, and be honest with yourself about that one, because tired owners defer maintenance and deferred maintenance is a discount at sale. Your balloon comes due in the next two or three years. Or your building's numbers only work using the insurance quote from the year you bought it.

Here's the thing about selling into this market that owners don't expect me to say: it's actually a decent time. Volume is strong, buyers are active and funded, and plenty of them are still pricing off in-place income with a little optimism baked in. You're not selling into a dead market. You're selling into a busy one that's honest about price. Two years from now I expect the buildings will still be there, but the buyer pool will have fully priced today's expenses into every comp, and the "I didn't know insurance did that" buyer will be extinct.

What I'd do first

Not list the building. Price it. Those are different things.

Run your actual numbers, current insurance quote, realistic management fee, real maintenance, the tax bill your buyer will inherit, and see what your building earns today, honestly underwritten. Then put a market cap rate on it. For most smaller buildings in secondary and tertiary Florida markets, that means the 7s and 8s, not the 5s you saw in a 2022 comp or in some national survey built from institutional deals in Tampa and Miami.

Sometimes that number says sell. Sometimes it genuinely says hold, and I tell owners that all the time, because the fastest way to lose your trust is to tell you to sell a building you should keep. But either way, you'll be making the decision with a real number instead of a memory.

That's exactly what my valuation model does, the same income approach I'd run if you hired me to price it. Takes a few minutes, and the number it gives you is the honest one.