Polk County: A Housing Market in Transition
The face of the Polk County housing market is changing.
Before too long, Polk County’s Interstate 4 corridor is expected to merge into the sprawls of Tampa and Orlando, creating a giant megapolitan area.
And as available land becomes scarce and South Florida mortgage costs skyrocket, the local real estate market is destined to thrive again.
Those were the messages from land and development experts at Tuesday’s Florida Real Estate Land Conference at Eaglebrooke in Lakeland.
The conference is sponsored by Dean Saunders, owner and broker of Coldwell Banker Commercial Saunders Real Estate in Lakeland.
Central Florida is one of only a handful of locations in the country where the merge of the metro areas could happen, said Robert Lang, co-director for the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech.
“This county is in a privileged location.”
During the conference, attended by nearly 200 land owners, developers and Realtors from around Florida, Lang discussed Polk outlook for commercial real estate and residential development. The annual conference also included speakers James Sellen and David Lereah.
Florida has two of the country’s 20 megapolitans, the Florida Corridor and the Treasure Coast. A megapolitan region is an area connected by two or more metro areas with anchor principal cities, like Tampa and Orlando, between 50 and 2,000 miles apart, where people commute for employment.
The Florida Corridor spans much of the Southwest Florida housing market, from Fort Myers in the southwest to Daytona Beach in the northeast, with Polk County in the middle.
The Treasure Coast megapolitan spans from Vero Beach in the north to Miami, long a hotbed of Florida mortgage activity and of home price growth.
The proximity of the cities along the strip of land, coupled with how the population commutes to work, connects the regions. Polk’s attraction is the lower cost of living and accessibility to the two large metropolitan areas at its borders.
Commuters can easily travel to work in Orange and Hillsborough counties, said Lang, a professor for Virginia Tech’s school of planning and international affairs.
U.S. Census population projections have Polk at 624,348 residents by 2020, the year Lang also predicted the merging of Tampa, Polk and Orlando.
Already, about 4,000 commuters are migrating in from Hillsborough and Orange counties, a trend that is bound to spur Florida home mortgage demand greatly in the near future.
“I still think the outlook is good when it comes to growth,” said Sellen, executive vice president of MSCW, an Orlando planning firm. “We are still growing. We just aren’t growing as much.”
The Central Florida housing market is still thriving, despite all of the declines in the residential real estate market. But to keep up with the projected populatio growth and demands in the real estate market, the look of Polk’s real estate will need to change as well.
In other words, no longer will single-family homes be the norm.
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