Even the American billionaire and Republican Peter Thiel believes that the value of residential real estate and the rentals in Florida are unreasonably high. The businessman who moved to Miami Beach from the Silicon Valley warned conservatives that the rapidly growing prices of local properties make the Sunshine State more similar to California than they like to admit. Speaking at the National Conservatism Conference held at JW Marriott Miami Turnberry Resort & Spa on September 11 and 12, Thiel said that if a high-growth alternative to states like California emerges, prices for local real estate will drop rapidly.
The publication UnHerd quoted Peter as saying that the demand for Florida real estate has been growing rapidly over the past two or three years, but this didn’t prove that the Sunshine State was able to offer a better model than California. Still, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has probably created the best alternative to California, according to Thiel.
Thiel, one of the first Facebook investors and a co-founder of PayPal, Founders Fund, and Palantir Technologies, moved to Miami Beach in late 2020, buying two neighboring houses on Venetian Islands for $18 million.
Since then, house prices and rentals have surge rapidly throughout South Florida, as many companies moved to this state or made a decision to expand. Wealthy Americans also started to move here from larger megalopolises after remote work was introduced due to the coronavirus-related restrictions. The Sunshine State lured them with the lack of an income tax and cheap residences. Even Founders Fund owned by Thiel moved its office to Miami, where a number of tech firms already have their headquarters. Now, however, Florida has become the least affordable market across the whole country.
Peter warned fellow conservatives that they shouldn’t be complacent about “not being California” simply because they disliked technologies and left-wing liberal views embraced in that state. While being true, it didn’t cancel out the need to increase the supply in the real estate market in order to solve the problem.