How home prices once surged in Florida, creating new boomtowns

The pandemic-fueled phenomenon of remote white collar workers, suddenly free to work from home, leveraging their higher salaries to buy homes in cheaper areas, dramatically changed Florida's west coast.

The big picture: All those remote workers drove up home prices in formerly inexpensive areas, turning Cape Coral and others into "pandemic boomtowns," Axios Markets' Emily Peck reports. Rents surged, too.

On the flip side: In Tampa, a big chunk of home sellers dropped their asking price in July as the housing market cooled.

State of play: These booms aren't busting, per se, but they're slowing down as higher mortgage rates, coupled with higher prices, crush demand.

Flashback: In the pandemic boomtowns, homebuyer incomes (the wages of all the fancy newcomers) soared over the past two years — and home prices went up right along with them, according to a new Redfin analysis.

• In Boise, Idaho, the poster-child of pandemic real estate, the median income for homebuyers in 2021 was $98,000 — a 24% increase from two years prior. Meanwhile, home prices surged 53% in that time period.

🔎 Zoom in: In North Port and Cape Coral, homebuyer income surged nearly 20%, while home prices jumped almost 50%.