5 Distinct Styles of Living in NW Florida is Your Style Here

So, you're moving here in Northwest Florida, and you're wondering if this is the right place for you. What sort of style of living are you looking for and does it exist here. Well, in this video, we're going to go over the five distinct styles for living here in Northwest Florida. And, is the one that you're looking for, does it exist here? Well, we're going to find out.

Alright. So, let's get into Northwest Florida. Let's talk about the five distinct styles that we might be going over. So, what are those ones that we'll be looking at today? Well, of course, it's Florida. Right? So, we got our condo style. We've got our single-family suburban style kind of living. We have a kind of urban ish style. We have luxury, obviously beautiful places there. And heck, we even have a country style. So, let's go into each one.

1. CONDO STYLE

So, condo style living is exactly what you think it is. Especially living here and a vacation town, beach town, if you will. Most of these different ones are going to be more of a minimalistic kind of vacation life. Especially if you're only spending part time here or maybe you want a snowbird in Florida while you're down here and only spend maybe six months or four months out of the time and then go back up north. A lot of those things that you're already going to have furniture in here everything is taken care of you. So, if you don't like to mow the lawn, you don't have to do it here. Right? The HOA takes care of all that. You have a pool or whatever amenities, sometimes a workout room right on there. A lot of the ones that you're going to see here are going to have a lot of that stuff. And not only that, but the condos are always located around stuff to do. So, you don't have to worry about traveling too far to go do the things that you want to do. Or step out right outside, maybe have a balcony looking over the beautiful, beautiful gulf coast, the Emerald coast, and see in that water every morning, going down doing beach walks. Whatever it is that that makes you want to live that style, absolutely wonderful. Now, if that's something that you're into, let's talk about prices. Here on the Emerald Coast, we're talking from Pensacola all the way to Panama City Beach. You're looking for those beach condos, our median price is going to be around $600,000. So, that's a high of all the way up to $8.2 million if you're into something like that, or as low as $80,000. Now, just know that those lower ones are probably a studio, maybe not necessarily on the golf, maybe sitting on the bay or the Intercoastal waterway. But, that's basically the range you should be looking for. Obviously, if you want some more information or send it in kind of narrow down your search, just give myself or my team a call here and we'll help you out. And that goes with anything here. Okay.

2. SINGLE-FAMILY SUBURBAN STYLE

Number two is our single-family suburban style living. Right? What you're typically going to find for that, most of these homes are like a 3-bedroom, 2-bath. There's a good portion that are four, two's and up. We don't have a whole lot of two bedrooms or below that. You're going to see a lot of dissimilar homes. Why? Because this area is very eclectic. There was no zoning in certain areas when they built this place out. Because it was just vast open area where you had this gorgeous white sand beach, flanked by, you know, big luscious trees and forest right behind us. It's nothing like you'd seen before if you haven't been down to a place like this. And, because of that, they brought in the military. It was cheaper. It had Eglin Air Force base. So, everything was really belong to the base and started kind of buying it back from the city. So, one example being that, the base housing for the military folks was a whole bunch of trailers. And then, when they gave it back to, you know, the city and started selling those out, it was basically trailer parks. And then people would build homes, so you'd have a trailer park next to a home that's, you know, a block or two away from something sitting on the water. So, there wasn't any like project plans that happened that. So, the whole place is eclectic and dissimilar homes. It's all the way from the 1950's to brand new construction. Now, we're seeing a lot of those older homes and a lot of the trailers getting uplifted and out and people are building on those now that the values have appreciated so much. But you're also going to see a lot of the older homes and most of which have been renovated. That you'll see a lot of renovated homes now that are out there bringing that current value up a little bit more. So, let's talk about that. For single family homes across the Emerald Coast, you're looking somewhere between or rather your median home price for about $385,000. Now, honestly, that could go as high as $13.3 million or as low as $39,000. Thirty-nine thousand is probably not going to get you too much of a livable area. You may need to, you'll definitely need to bring some money with that to get that up to speed.

3. URBAN-ISH STYLE

We don't have big cities out here on the Emerald Coast. The best ones that we can give you or offer you is Pensacola or Panama City. And Pensacola's, I'm going to call a medium to small size city. You're going to get a lot of the amenities that go with that. You have the, you know, if you want to go to a ball game, they've got a semi pro ball club that's there. They also have an ice rink and of course inside that, it's arena. So, they have that, they have a hockey team, actually, that's down here. You have a good amount of restaurants. You have like a main strip called Palafox Street where a lot of the different restaurants, different bars, and things like that exist on there. That one also has a military station, the NAS Pensacola that's out there for the navy. So, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's in there. But, it's not a huge city with a whole lot of infrastructure like a subway or anything like that that exists. Now, you also have it out in Panama City, it's a little bit smaller of an area in comparison. It's not really that small. It's just more spread out. And, it's more of a smaller city that's there. Again, there's another military installation, which is Tyndall Air Force base that's out there too. More affordable housing that you're going to find in Pensacola and Panama City just because of the demographics that are there.

4. LUXURY STYLE

Okay. Moving on to number four. You also have luxury style. Maybe luxury style is your thing. So, the big areas that you're going to be looking at that we know we call it 30a. Alright? And that's that stretch of roadway that we call a highway or actually it's just Route 30a. So, follow that on a Google map, and you'll see that you can go to Seaside, Rosemary Beach, Watercolors, all those different areas that are down there off of that is more of a luxury style feel that you're going to have to it. Drive down any of these areas, take a look and you'll see exactly what that is. Starting price getting in there is just shy of a mill. Okay? Not just 30A, but we can also venture that there are some luxury areas in Miramar Beach. Now, not just vacation rentals that are out there, there are dedicated communities that are gated throughout Miramar Beach and parts of Destin that are more luxury based and just for residential purposes, you know, for somebody who live there that owns an owner occupier. Right? So, let's kind of look at what that is. You have a median price for a single-family home is around $975,000. See, just shy of a million. That high goes as high as $31.2 million, which is like a mansion. And entry level, the lowest that we could possibly find in here in the past year was $282,000. And that sounds like something you could move into. And it really wasn't. So, getting into this is definitely going to be pricey, but, of course, you pay what you or you to pay for what you get.

5. COUNTRY STYLE

Alright. And number five, the country style. You think you're moving to Florida, everything's beachy. Now, most of this area is actually wooded and undeveloped. A lot of that has to do with the Eglin Air Force Base, not allowing anybody to build on certain areas there. But there's plenty of different spaces for you to go. Well, I would consider this area to be more country is anywhere about 30 or 20-30 minute north of the Gulf, north of the ocean. If you get all the way up to there, we start to see things start to spread out. You know, there's farms, there's all sorts of different things. There's horse ranch whenever you want to look for, there's  lots of that out in that area. So, we're looking at bigger homes, more ranch style homes. Really still pretty eclectic. I mean, it could be a trailer on one lot and it could be a huge, a plantation house on the, on another lot. It could be acres and acres, you know, it could just be one or two to three acres. There's a whole array of them. But if you're looking to kind of be out away from everybody, but still be, you know, thirty minutes to an hour drive to get down to the beach, I mean, that exists here, it absolutely does. So, what's that look like? It's single-family homes in these areas, median price is about $309,000 as of the day of this video here in 2022. There were as high as 2 million and as low as $20,000. And, those twenty thousand homes maybe be able to get you, wouldn't have to do a full rehab in order to live in it, but probably. But some of these areas are pretty rural. So, you may be or more likely be on the septic tank system if you side to purchase something out there. You may or may not be on public water. You may actually have a well, that depends on how deep out in the middle of nowhere that you are, which is the safest part of nowhere.

Alright. Well, that's all I have for you. The 5 distinct styles of living in Northwest Florida. If you got any questions about anything I mentioned here, please feel free to call/text us at 850.320.7757 or email us at Admin@WhittemoreGroupRE.com