Florida’s Governor is fuming about the state of residential real estate and how it impacts younger people, suggesting that institutional capital is to blame for blocking people from homeownership.
During a press conference in Tampa at the Hillsborough County Aviation Authority at SkyCenter One, Gov. Ron DeSantis said “it’s expensive, it’s hard, especially for young people who are just starting.”
“A lot of people say, ‘Well, wait a minute, is BlackRock going in and buying these neighborhoods?’ And so they can afford to buy the homes and then they just rent it out to people,” DeSantis said, wondering if the U.S. will become “a nation of renters.”
BlackRock says, meanwhile, that it “is an active investor in the U.S. real estate market, but we are not among the institutional investors buying single-family homes.”
The Governor went on to spotlight a “very troubling statistic.”
“There are more would-be homebuyers that are over the age of 70 in the United States than under the age of 30. So that’s telling me, like, these young kids, they’re not even in the game, and I think it’s because it’s not affordable,” he said.
The Governor argued that perhaps investors could have different property tax levels than homesteaders, as he continues to push for property tax relief.
DeSantis used his own personal story to illustrate how things have changed, suggesting that he and First Lady Casey DeSantis were advantaged by being able to time the buy of their first house at the “bottom of the market” 15 years ago.
“I was a lieutenant in the Navy. It wasn’t like I was living high on the hog. And she was successful doing what she was doing with TV. But, you know, we were able to do that,” he said.
“If we were starting out today, me being in the Navy and her doing what she was in, I don’t think we would have been able to afford even a modest … 1,800-square-foot house. … It was nice, but I mean, it was not, like, extravagant. There’s no way we’d be able to afford that,” he said.
The DeSantises sold their home in Ponte Vedra in part because the Governor wanted to avoid “renting it out and having, like, a landlord-tenant dispute,” as he said during an Iowa speech in 2023.
To maintain residency, he rented a condo in his congressional district from a company co-run by old friend and political backer, Kent Stermon, who took his own life in 2022 amid personal health struggles and a scandal in which he solicited sexual favors from a young woman with the promise of tickets and access to pop singer Taylor Swift.
One estimate is that during the first year after the DeSantises sold their house in Ponte Vedra, it went up in value by more than $200,000, with the pandemic leading to an infusion of liquidity into the monetary system.
During that same Iowa speech mentioned above, he presented the increase in housing values as a boon for “middle-class people that doubled their wealth.”
However, it’s clear he now sees a darker side to a housing boom that has passed, with Florida having moved from a seller’s market to a buyer’s bonanza in recent months.
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