ORLANDO, Fla. — Central Florida is slowly running out of runway before it faces another housing squeeze and rapid rent increases, one of Orlando’s leading developers warned.
Craig Ustler, who was a driving force behind Orlando’s Creative Village, said his company and others were not building enough new housing units to meet the demand of people who continue to move to the metro area at a rate of 1,100 per week.
He said in the years after the pandemic, when Orlando went through a housing boom, his company would finish 16,000 units of housing per year – above their normal 10,000.
For the past several years, as cranes have been vacant in Orlando’s skyline, he said they’ve built less than 5,000 units per year because high interest rates have made financing projects much more difficult.
Orlando renters and homebuyers have received a break over the past couple of years. Average rents for a one-bedroom apartment have fallen to $1,450 from a high of nearly $1,700. The average cost for a home has also fluctuated within a range of $375,000 to $425,000, depending on the season.
“We’re in this we’re in this gulf that nobody sees yet,” Ustler said, mentioning that it takes three years to see a project from start to finish. “You’re sort of living off that really big amount of supply that came on a few years ago, but that’s largely been absorbed… It’s going to probably get back to some of the really scary times that we saw with double digit rent increases.”
Ustler’s prediction is not without merit, according to others who study housing trends. Real estate agents expect the housing market to pick up steam in the later half of 2026 as long as the Federal Reserve does what’s expected of them by analysts and lowers interest rates two or three more times.
Orlando leaders said they’re looking at 3% more people moving to the city each year than housing units being built, creating an expected 46,000 housing unit deficit within a decade.
To combat this, they launched Orlando Unlocked last summer, which aims to make it easier to build small apartment buildings within the developed areas of the city.
They are also helping Tavistock permit its Sunbridge development in east Orange County.
Combined, the effort has already produced 60,000 units that are somewhere in the permitting or construction stage, the city’s website announced.
Ustler advised people to pay attention now by telling politicians where the housing should go, instead of opposing projects down the street from them.
“We need advocates for more supply in the right spot,” he explained. “We can’t just have people that are against it in the wrong spot.”
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