While home prices are rising fast, a growing lack of affordability is pushing Florida closer to the housing bubble that some analysts have been saying is coming.
Active listings on the market are up more than 20% compared to last year while three cities in the state's West Coast were rated as the most likely in the country to see prices fall in the next year.
One Florida property to recently hit the market belongs to Britney Spears — freed from a 13-year conservatorship last November, the pop star listed a 3,600-square-foot townhouse in Destin earlier this week.
The three-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom apartment takes up the 10th floor of a condo building and comes with both floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the ocean from the inside and a balcony that offers panoramic outdoor views.
The Controversial Spears Family Condo
Spears, who purchased the property at the height of her fame in 2001 for $920,000, is now looking to sell it for $2 million.
As is often done with celebrity sales, the seller was listed through a limited liability company called Bridgemore Timber LLC, but as Realtor.com first reported, the company is often used for the Spears family's real estate transactions.
Rob Augustine of Corcoran Reverie is the listing agent representing the property.
Aside from offering sweeping views of the gulf, the Destin condo also comes with some murky family backstory.
After a public breakdown placed Spears under the conservatorship of her father Jamie Spears in 2008, the pop star lost the right to decide everything from her finances to her ability to have another child.
During that time, Spears' younger sister Jamie Lynn Spears had often said that she did not use or benefit from Britney's wealth estimated at around $60 million. As the "Free Britney" movement started to take off, fans unearthed a 2015 tweet in which Jamie Lynn says that "we have a condo in Destin."
Many criticized it as the older Spears had purchased the condo independently after reaching global fame with hits like "Baby One More Time" and "Oops! I Did It Again." Jamie Lynn Spears later publicly said that she was not the one who owned the condo.
Freed from the conservatorship, Spears promptly married boyfriend Sam Asghari and listed the condo. If she gets what she asks for it, she will have nearly double what she put into it back in 2001.
Luxury Real Estate and Florida Go Hand In Hand
The Spears condo is relatively modest to the multi-million-dollar real estate transactions done by both celebrities and private equity moguls in South Florida.
In June 2021, German entrepreneur Ernst Langner sold a 16,000-square-foot Palm Beach mansion for $103 million while Oracle (ORCL) co-founder Larry Ellison recently paid $145 million for a North Palm Beach estate just a few weeks after buying a nearby estate for $173 million.
Destin, meanwhile, is located in northwestern Okaloosa County and is more popular among football players and country singers. The Jim Carrey movie "The Truman Show" was filmed not far from Spears' condo in Destin in the 1990s.
With a population of over 21 million residents, Florida is a state whose real estate market varies significantly depending on the exact location. Super-popular celebrity enclaves have been seeing some market cooling simply due to the higher-and-higher price tags being listed during the pandemic.
Oskaloosa, meanwhile, saw the price of an average single-family home rise by 9.6% to $485,000.
