By Brenden Rendo, Realtor · Updated September 4, 2026
On September 2, The Telegraph in London published a feature headlined “Florida’s housing market goes into meltdown.” It was picked up by Yahoo Finance and MSN the same day. The reporter had contacted me the week before, I sent her a full first-party data brief from the Stellar MLS feed on August 28, and she wrote back to say she was grateful for it. None of it appears in the article. What does appear is a headline that the article’s own charts do not support, and an opening anecdote from a resort community that I cannot find in any public record. So here is the brief she did not use, plus what I found when I pulled every sale in that resort.
- Three of the five charts in The Telegraph’s article contradict its headline. Sales are up 7.7% year over year, active listings are down 14%, and the Zillow home value index is down 2.1%.
- In Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties, 56% of homes that closed this summer sold without a single price reduction, at 99.2% of the original ask. Closed sales in July were up 6.1% on last year. New listings were flat.
- Margaritaville Resort Orlando, the article’s opening example, really did fall about 42% at the median. It is a short-term-rental investor resort in Osceola County, built 2018 to 2023, where buyers paid $424 per square foot at the peak. It is not the mainstream market.
- The specific example in the article, a townhouse bought for $710,000 and sold for $340,000, is not in the MLS or in Osceola County deed records. No townhouse there ever sold above $637,000 and no resale lost more than 38%.
- Who is underwater in that resort is a question of purchase year. Every owner who bought before 2021 is still asking a profit. The 2023 buyers who bought direct from the builder are asking a median 23.5% below what they paid.
Three charts that contradict the headline
The article carries five interactive charts. I pulled the underlying datasets behind each one. Three of them tell a different story from the caption sitting on top of them.
Chart 1. Captioned “Florida’s housing market is struggling”
- Source: Redfin, Florida home sales in July
- July 2025: 29,873 sales
- July 2026: 32,181 sales
- What it shows: Sales up 7.7% year over year. The article reports only that sales are down 20% from 2019 and never mentions the rise.
Chart 2. Captioned “Florida homeowners race to sell”
- Source: Realtor.com, Florida active listings in July
- July 2025: 174,584 listings
- July 2026: 150,062 listings
- What it shows: Inventory down 14% year over year. Fewer homes for sale, not more. The caption says the opposite of the data beneath it.
Chart 3. Captioned “House values have dropped to a five-year low”
- Source: Zillow Home Value Index, Florida, July
- July 2025: $386,477
- July 2026: $378,166
- What it shows: Down 2.1% year over year, down 7% from the 2024 peak, and still 53% above July 2019.
None of those three numbers are mine. They are the article’s. A 2.1% decline in a home value index after a 60% run-up is a correction. Sales rising and inventory falling in the same month is the opposite of a market racing for the exit. The remaining two charts are a national FHA delinquency series, which is not a Florida figure at all, and a Central Florida distressed-sale share that the article itself concedes is well below the pre-pandemic level.
Margaritaville: a real 42% drop, and why it is not your neighborhood
The article opens with an investor at Margaritaville Resort Orlando who supposedly bought a three-bedroom townhouse for $710,000 in 2022 and sold it this year for $340,000. I am not going to pretend that community is fine. I pulled every residential record in it from Stellar MLS, 799 sale-side listings and 469 closed sales since 2019, and then matched the current listings against Osceola County Property Appraiser deed records to get the purchase price for the homes that were bought direct from the builder and never resold. Here is what that looks like.
| Year | Closed sales | Median sale price | Median price per sq ft | Median days on market | Sold below original ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 23 | $369,000 | $259 | 35 | 65% |
| 2020 | 44 | $375,000 | $253 | 118 | 80% |
| 2021 | 127 | $490,000 | $334 | 15 | 44% |
| 2022 | 84 | $675,000 | $424 | 38 | 60% |
| 2023 | 55 | $615,000 | $398 | 20 | 73% |
| 2024 | 36 | $480,000 | $308 | 144 | 100% |
| 2025 | 66 | $437,500 | $284 | 102 | 92% |
| 2026 YTD | 34 | $393,000 | $281 | 91 | 88% |
That is a 42% fall at the median from the 2022 peak. It is real, and it is brutal for anyone who bought in 2022 or 2023. But look at what the community is. It is a master-planned short-term-rental resort next to Walt Disney World, in Osceola County, built between 2018 and 2023. Six hundred of the 799 records are detached “cottages” of 1,400 to 1,900 square feet that investors paid $424 per square foot for in 2022 so they could rent them to tourists by the night. The deed records show several of them were quit-claimed into LLCs within months of purchase. This is investment product that was priced on projected Airbnb revenue, in a county I do not even work in. Presenting it as “mainstream real estate in the Sunshine State” is the core problem with the article.
It gets more specific than that. There are 44 homes for sale in the community right now. I compared every one of them to what the current owner paid.
| Year the current owner bought | Homes for sale | Median asking price vs. what they paid |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 to 2020 | 9 | +28.6% (range +24% to +76%) |
| 2021 | 10 | -12.4% |
| 2022 | 16 | -12.6% |
| 2023 | 8 | -23.5% |
Every owner who bought before 2021 is still asking a profit, some of them a large one. Every owner who bought in 2023 is asking a loss, and the eight of them are the deepest cuts on the board. The people who are underwater bought short-term-rental product from the builder at the top of the cycle. That is a story about a vintage of investor purchases, not about Florida housing.
The anecdote I could not find
The article’s opening example is a three-bedroom townhouse bought new for $710,000 in 2022 and sold this year for $340,000, a loss of more than half. I looked for it two ways. First, in 469 closed MLS sales, no townhouse in that community has ever closed above $637,000. Every 2022 sale at $700,000 or more was a detached cottage. Second, in the Osceola County deed file, the most expensive townhouse the builder ever sold was $607,800. There are three-bedroom townhouses that resold in 2025 and 2026 for $330,000 to $360,000, and the ones with a recorded purchase price were bought for $469,000 to $557,000. The deepest recorded loss on any resale in the community is 38%.
That does not mean the transaction did not happen. It could have been off-market, or the figures could include furnishings and setup costs. But as printed, it cannot be verified, and it is the first thing every reader of the article sees.
What the four-county MLS actually shows
This is the brief I sent The Telegraph on August 28, from the Stellar MLS feed for Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties. It is the same weekly analysis I publish on the Central Florida housing market hub and the buyer leverage index.
I took every residential sale that closed in the four counties between May 1 and July 31, 2026, which is 10,795 sales, and split them by whether the seller ever cut the asking price.
| Seller’s price history | Share of sales | Count | Median days, list to close | Achieved % of original ask |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never cut the price | 56.0% | 6,043 | 49 | 99.2% |
| Cut 1% to 5% | 21.4% | 2,312 | 102 | 95.4% |
| Cut 5% to 10% | 13.0% | 1,402 | 133 | 90.8% |
| Cut 10% or more | 9.6% | 1,038 | 193 | 82.3% |
More than half of everything that sold this summer sold without a single price reduction, in about seven weeks, for essentially the full asking price. The sellers who chased the market down gave up roughly 17 points of price and spent four times as long doing it. The market is not refusing to buy. It is refusing to overpay.
- Fewer people are listing, not more. New listings in July 2026 came to 4,833, against 4,846 in July 2025. Flat.
- More people are buying. Closed sales in July 2026 were 3,568 against 3,363 a year earlier, up 6.1%.
- Discounting narrowed, it did not widen. In May through July 2026, 73.2% of sales closed below the original ask and the typical seller achieved 96.5% of it. In the same three months of 2025, 75.7% closed below ask and the typical seller achieved 95.9%.
- Distress is tiny. Short sales were 40 of 10,795 closings, or 0.4%. Up from 18 a year earlier, and worth watching, but still 0.4%. Bank-owned and foreclosure sales in that window: zero.
- The pain is in condos. 88.8% of condo sales closed below the original ask at a median 8.8% discount, against 70.7% and 5.3% for single-family homes. The driver is post-Surfside reserve funding and special assessments, not the owner’s own insurance premium.
- Insurance is getting cheaper. The article never mentions insurance. Florida premiums are coming down, which I covered in the brief and which cuts directly against the affordability narrative.
The 30-year fixed rate sat at 6.66% on August 27 per the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That is the number that removed the marginal buyer who made 2021 pricing work. It is also a number the article gets right.
Who was quoted, and what they sell
The article quotes three people. One is a national analytics vendor whose closing quote is that he does not expect another 50% drop. One is a brokerage co-founder talking about builder incentives. The third, who supplies the opening anecdote and the Central Florida distress figure, is the broker of the team that handled the Margaritaville sale. Stellar MLS records show that team as list agent on 35 listings in that community since 2021, with four residential listings and three condo-hotel units active there right now, all of them cut from the original asking price. That is not a secret and it is not improper. A broker who specializes in a resort that has fallen 42% is going to see a meltdown every day at work. It is context the article should have given its readers.
What this means if you own or are buying here
If you own a home in Orange, Seminole, Lake or Volusia and you bought before 2022, the data says you are fine. Prices are flat to slightly down from the peak and still far above where you bought. If you bought at the 2022 peak, you have a thin cushion and the number that matters is your list price, not the headline. Homes priced to today’s comparables are closing in seven weeks at full ask. Homes priced to a 2022 neighbor are sitting, then cutting, then sitting some more. You can check where you stand with the home value estimator or ask me for a proper analysis.
If you are buying, you have 13,449 active listings to choose from and 43% of them have been on the market 60 days or more. That is leverage, and you should use it. It is not a crash to wait out. My outlook is flat sales and flat appreciation for years rather than quarters unless rates fall or wages catch up, and I would rather you buy the right house at a fair price than wait for a collapse the data does not show coming.
Frequently asked questions
Is the Florida housing market crashing in 2026?
Not on the evidence. In Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties, 10,795 homes closed between May 1 and July 31, 2026. 56% of them sold without a single price reduction, in a median 49 days, at 99.2% of the original asking price. Short sales were 0.4% of closings and bank-owned sales were zero. Prices are flat to slightly down from the 2022 peak. That is a repricing, not a crash.
Did Margaritaville Resort Orlando home values really fall by half?
The median sale price in the community fell from $675,000 in 2022 to $393,000 in 2026 year to date, a drop of about 42% at the median. But no townhouse there has ever sold above $637,000, and the deepest recorded loss on any resale is 38%. The specific example of a $710,000 townhouse resold for $340,000 does not appear in the MLS or in Osceola County deed records.
Are Central Florida sellers cutting prices more than last year?
Slightly less. In May through July 2026, 73.2% of closed sales in the four counties sold below the original asking price, and the typical seller achieved 96.5% of the original ask. In the same three months of 2025, 75.7% sold below ask and the typical seller achieved 95.9%. Discounting narrowed year over year.
I sent The Telegraph this data before the article ran. I will send it to you too. Call or text Brenden Rendo at 407-616-9019, or start with the Central Florida housing market hub, which refreshes every Sunday.
Sources: Stellar MLS, residential closings and active listings for Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia counties, pulled August 27 and 28, 2026, and for Rolling Oaks / Margaritaville Resort Orlando, Kissimmee 34747, pulled September 3, 2026. Osceola County Property Appraiser 2025 certified sales file, qualified deeds only. The Telegraph chart data from the article’s published Datawrapper datasets (Redfin, Realtor.com, Zillow ZHVI). Freddie Mac PMMS, August 27, 2026.
