What are the Pros and Cons of Living in NW Florida in 2022

So, you're moving to Northwest Florida and you're wondering, what are the pros for this area and what are the cons? Well, in this video, we're going to go over the 5 PROS and CONS of living here in the Emerald Coast in Northwest Florida.

Let's talk about some of the PROS and CONS of living here in Northwest Florida. What we call our area is the panhandle. If you look at the map and you look at Florida, you see that we've got Central Florida over here to the east and then it kind of goes off to the, you know, to the west, we call that area the panhandle, like the rest is just the pan. But, what we're covering is Pensacola, Destin, 30A, Panama City, all the way out to just about Tallahassee. When it changes time zones, that's when we're like, yep, that's our area. If we're actually in central time zone in Northwest Florida, versus the eastern that the rest of Florida is. Yeah. We had to be different.

So, what is this area known for? Well, it's the Emerald Coast. You know, if they've got that Emerald Color Water, they're not doctoring it. The best of my knowledge of those pictures, it actually does look like that. Flying to with of course, that white, like, just powdery sand and it's flanked by these forests on most of the side of it. And, most of this area is pretty undeveloped in comparison to, you know, everything down in central and south Florida. Down there, you go to a lot of different places and it's condo city. Here, it seems a lot more undeveloped little bit more rural. And because of that, it has a certain feel to it. And, you know, we're known again for the tourism out here because of it. Destin brings its own certain crowd in here. Of course, you got the fishing, boating, all throughout that way. You've got Panama City that brings in a lot of the spring breakers and so on and so forth. There's just tons of people coming here to experience that and of course just that beach life. Right?

So, let's go ahead and talk about the CONS.

I always like to get those out of the way first and we can kind of go from there and then get to the good stuff. Right? Alright. So, let's go into the cons first.

1. TRAFFIC

Number one con for a living here in Northwest Florida is the traffic. Oh, God, the traffic. It drives me crazy. And because of it, you know, the infrastructure just isn't there. They're trying so hard to kind of build it out and it's been years and years and years and years, you know, it's there's cones everywhere. There's always some sort of road projects that's been going on, especially in the Miramar Beach area. But, there's not enough alternative routes that's not going to take an additional hour versus sitting in traffic for you to go. And because of that, it kind of has that back up. Why is it like that? Is well, first of all, you're in a coastal town. So you've got bays, bayous and things like that, that you can't just go over. Right? So you have to go around a lot of those things. And because of that, it restricts the flow of traffic. In addition to, there's tons of, like, military bases and government areas that you can't drive through. And because of that, it restricts certain routes for you to go, and then the traffic just gets congested, for congestion sake. You know, it's pretty terrible sometimes. My best suggestion to all you viewers is to go ahead and get on your Google Maps or Waze or whatever. And before you even head out, check and see what that map looks like. And that way, you can plan accordingly of what that traffic's going to look like, or if you should just sit, you know, in your house or vacation rental or whatever you're doing in town and just chill until it goes. I used to do that when my office was in Destin. I have to go back to Fort Walton Beach that I got just going to hang here for 2 hours and do some more work.

2. HUMIDITY

Alright. Going on at number two, con of living here in Northwest Florida, is the humidity. Humidity makes things so much better or so much worse. It really depends upon you. Right? But we'll talk about heat. When you match heat with that humidity, it makes it so much more intense. So, if you really like a hot in 80's, 90's degrees with 90+ percent humidity, you're going to love this area. But if you walk out there and you're used to just hanging out in the cool, then we'll go out there and you're just instantly just drenched, well, that could be a con for you. However, it does kind of get cold here too. We've seen temperatures down to as low as 20 degrees sometimes in the wintertime. That's not normal. But it just seems like every 3-4 years will will have a good cold spell that comes in here. Normal temperatures are around 45, 46 to about 55 during the wintertime. But it also is coupled with that same humidity. That humidity makes the cold colder as well. So, we all joke because Floridians that, you know, we've got that Florida skin so, everything seems colder. But I think it has a ton to do with the humidity that's going on here.

3. COMMUNITIES CAN BE PRETTY ECLECTIC

Alright. Number three con. As the communities that you see throughout this area seem to be a bit eclectic. As you probably seen in previous videos of mine, it's always been described that say, you go into a city like Fort Walton Beach. And you go down to, like, the downtown area, you drive down, let's say, Brook Street or Bay, and you see these nice homes sitting on the water. And they're, you know, one point eight, two point whatever million dollars sitting over there and they're like, wow, that's amazing. And then as you drive and you kind of look over to the other side and it's point five maybe three, four hundred thousand dollar homes. Big difference between one side of the other street. And now that house is probably about six blocks away from a trailer park. So you're like, what is really going on here? Now they are getting better. A lot of the old eclectic houses that maybe were built 50s or, you know, some trailer parks, things like that, have been bought up and they're putting newer construction in here as demand for housing has gone crazy here in the past couple of years. But it has been getting a little bit better, but zoning was never a thing here. Because of the, there was nothing here for a long time. And because of that, you know, it was the air force base and they're just started letting land out. And because of that just kind of pocketing and everything. But yes, communities can be pretty eclectic. Although just it adds to the areas vibe, which is still pretty relaxed and, you know, it's still a really nice place to live.

4. HOUSING COST

Number four con. The housing costs continue to rise at a high rate. The date of this video is 2022. We saw the last two years, the market go a bit crazy as far as appreciation for assets. And because of that, it's driven a lot of people out from purchasing homes. It also has driven people out from being able to afford rent. You know, taxes never go down, they only go up. So, you know, rents continue to rise as well. They dropped a ton of insurance. So, you know, landlords and homeowners had to take on the cost of higher insurance, which again is hiring up the price of owning or renting homes, you know. So, all these different things kept going higher and higher. However, there does seem to be some relief as we start to see interest rate rise. The buying power starts to go down, thus many buyers which should inflect the rest of the listing market, which should hope to stabilize. Although to see a drop in real estate, of course, I might eat my words here in a couple of years, but there's been no indicators that there's going to be a drop in value in homes over time. Just a slowdown of how the rate of which homes do appreciate. You can check out realtrends.com is where we get a lot of that data from.

5. HURRICANE AND FLOOD RISK

Okay. Con number five is about hurricane and flood risk. It's a risk here. Now, hurricane Michael was the last one that came through and that was in 2018 that came up and it was only a cat-3. For us Floridians were like, cat-3, maybe I'll stay. We'll get our hurricane party going, whatever. That's a real thing, by the way. But once it starts to go from 3-4, people start to go, alright, I'm getting out of town. Well, that thing within the last day as it pushed up, got from, like, CAT-3 to 4 to 5 as it hit landfall. It was just devastating throughout that area. It's absolutely terrible. But it only seems to happen every, 10 years or so that we've seen because previous to that, it was Hurricane Ivan was in 2004. Prior to that was Hurricane Opal in 1995. So, we only have these, these big systems roll through not so often. And because of that, you know, the risk is going to be there. You do have flooding because some times, it'll just rain hard for about 10 minutes, and it'll be bright and sunny and humid for a while. So you know that you will have those flooding and hurricane risk if you do decide to move here. This is a risk that we have. And just as a note, if you do purchase a house here, your hurricane insurance isn't added, it is part of your insurance. You can't purchase one without it, you know, unless you're buying cash for it. So, these are things that already are added to the cost when you do calculate that.

Okay. Enough about the cons. Alright. Let's mark that as done. Let's go through the PROS. What's some pros of living here in Northwest Florida?

1. GREAT WEATHER

Well, first is great weather. It's just phenomenal out here. It's a ton of sunshine. If you like the heat, this is the perfect place for you. Then we've only got maybe 3, 4 months of where it's kind of cold and it's only Florida cold. It's not real cold, it's Florida cold. Alright? I used to have a job that took me down to Antarctica in the Arctic Circle, and this isn't cold. So, it's all relative. Right? Okay. So, a great weather.

2. WHITE SANDY BEACHES

Number two pro on the list is, of course those white sandy beaches, you know. And not only that we have the white sandy beaches, flanked with the Emerald colored waters, it's just gorgeous. Is that, it's not like Central Florida or South Florida where it's condo city, you know, where you have to go through a ton of condos just to get out to the beach. It's not like that at all. And most of the ones that are out here aren't the huge high rises either. Most of them, especially as you go into Fort Walton and Destin, especially in Fort Walton Beach, I know Okaloosa Island, none of them go above six stories tall. So, it's really nice. It's undeveloped and there's great boating and just everything beach, water related. It's just awesome, awesome things to do here. That's why people come here to vacation and inevitably live. There's lots of entertainment around here too. These are tourist towns, so there's tons of stuff to go through. If you live here full time, you know, even us locals, but during the weekend, where are you going to go? Well, I'm going to go to Destin, where everybody else is hanging out. And cool festivals going on, you know, there's a great golf everywhere. There's just tons of water boating, fishing, all sorts of activities to do. Of course, you've got Panama City, there's plenty of things and great kind of nightlife atmosphere, beach atmosphere, you know, spring breaks a big thing. You can go into Pensacola, you know, like, if they even got a hockey team, baseball, you know, and a lot of small city stuff to do out there. There's, you know, of course, Pensacola Beach, which is south of Gulf Breeze. There's tons of stuff to do, especially if you want to be outside or hanging out inside in the AC, there's still plenty to do. Alright.

4. COST OF LIVING

Number four pro is cost of living is relatively low. Right? Average of the medium sized city, we're talking Pensacola, Panama City. They average around here around 96.6. Now, what I'm talking about is that, if you could see a scale up to a hundred where a hundred is the average across the Continental United States, that's still about 4%, 3-4% below our national average. So, depending upon where you're moving from, if you move from some place like California or New York or something that's really expensive, it's going to be really, really nice to come here because the cost of living is going to seem so much better. Just know that the whole state of Florida, the average on the index for cost of living is about 102.2.

5. GREAT PEOPLE

Okay, and last but not least, pro number five is just great people here. That was one of the reasons I moved, you know, down here permanently. I'm originally from upstate New York, and people are misunderstood. I mean, if you mentioned something like that down here, you know, people would say that New Yorkers are rude. And I'm going to say that, they are. Yeah. I'm from there, I can say that. So, coming down here, people are just generally nice. They have this thing called southern hospitality that kind of comes in, especially here on the Panhandle, from Georgia and Alabama. You also have the military like me that didn't even know that this place existed for a while. And then I was like, man, I love that place, I'm moving back here. So, you get a lot of diversity in our area as well because of that and in the military influence a lot of people moving in and out. And because of the tourism part of this as well, it just has a happy kind of beach vibe who's miserable on vacation, right? So, it kind of just affects you as you go out and do your day today. And people generally happy to be here and want to live here. That's a huge thing from any other place that I've lived or done real estate in. People want to be here and people love to be here especially in Northwest Florida. It's one of the best kept secrets. Sure people hate me for doing this channel and having more people come here, but we absolutely love it. Come be part of our culture.

Well, that's all I have for you for, what are the pros and cons of living here in Northwest Florida here in 2022. If you have 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