Tampa Bay's Condos Are Repricing While Its Houses Hold the Line

Tampa Bay's housing market has split in two. Detached houses across Hillsborough, Pinellas and Pasco counties are still selling near record prices, but the region's condominiums are in a clear, sustained decline — and the dividing line runs straight through Florida's post-Surfside condo-safety laws.

The Tampa–St. Petersburg–Clearwater metro's median condo and townhouse price fell to $275,000 in 2025, down 6.8% in a single year, while the median single-family home held at $400,000, off just 3.0%, according to Florida Realtors' year-end reports. The question for owners of the metro's aging waterfront towers is no longer whether prices are softening, but whether this is an ordinary correction or a structural repricing of older buildings now saddled with mandatory inspections, fully funded reserves and six-figure special assessments.

Pinellas County — with the oldest, most water-exposed condo stock in the region — is the epicenter. There, condos carried 7.6 months of supply in May 2026 against just 3.7 months for houses, according to Florida Realtors and the Suncoast Tampa Association of Realtors. That is the gap this piece is about: two property types, one metro, moving in opposite directions.

What the data shows

Indexed to the 2023 peak, the two lines tell the story. Condos climbed faster through the boom — the metro condo median jumped from $172,000 in 2019 to $299,000 in 2023 — then gave the gains back. By 2025 the condo index had fallen to 92.0 while single-family sat at 98.8: a 6.8-point gap that did not exist two years earlier, with condos down 8.0% from their peak and houses just 1.2% below their 2023 level.

In dollars, the metro's condo median dropped from $295,000 in 2024 to $275,000 in 2025, a 6.8% fall; the house median eased only from $412,500 to $400,000, down 3.0%, according to Florida Realtors' year-end MSA reports. The single-family market never gave back its gains the way condos did — houses in 2025 still sat near their all-time high, while condos had retraced most of a year of appreciation.

The divergence is sharpest at the margin. Florida Realtors reported that by late 2025 the Tampa metro's median condo-townhouse price was down about 12% from a year earlier on a monthly basis, against roughly 1.5% for single-family homes. Statewide the same split holds: condo prices fell 4.7% in 2025 to a year-end median of $305,000 while single-family prices slipped 1.4% to $413,990.

How we got here

The split traces to June 24, 2021, when Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside, killing 98 people. The building's reserve account held only about 6.9% of what it needed — roughly $777,000 against a $16.2 million repair estimate, according to condo-board documents reported by NBC News. Florida's answer was SB 4-D (2022), later amended by SB 154 (2023): every condo or co-op building three or more stories tall must complete a milestone structural inspection at 30 years of age — 25 near the coast — and a Structural Integrity Reserve Study to fund the repairs it uncovers.

The teeth came in the deadlines and the reserve rule. Buildings that hit 30 years before July 1, 2022 had to inspect by December 31, 2024, per DBPR guidance. And as of January 1, 2025, boards may no longer vote to waive reserve funding for the major structural components a SIRS covers — ending a pre-Surfside practice that had left many older Tampa Bay and Pinellas buildings chronically underfunded.

The 2025 Legislature softened the edges without removing them. HB 913, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis on June 24, 2025 and effective July 1, extended the reserve-study deadline to December 31, 2025, let associations fund reserves with loans or lines of credit on a majority owner vote, allowed a two-year pause on reserve funding after a milestone inspection to redirect money to urgent repairs, and raised the reserve threshold to $25,000 from $10,000. It also required local building officials to report inspection results to DBPR — turning a paperwork mandate into a statewide dataset.

The inspection data is now doing the arithmetic the market feared. As the chart shows, the overwhelming majority of the 8,736 buildings inspected in 2024 and 2025 cleared their Phase 1 review — but 1,575 were escalated to a deeper structural study, and 54 were declared unsafe or uninhabitable, most of them not yet vacated, according to the Florida Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability's July 2026 report on DBPR data. Repair values in that report ranged from under $1,000 to $30 million per building.

Set against Florida's roughly 1.1 million condo units already more than 30 years old — a stock concentrated in eight counties that include Pinellas and Hillsborough, per John Burns Research and Consulting — the inspections confirm the risk is concentrated, not universal. But the buyer pool now prices for it across the whole aging segment, which is what drags the median down.

What it means

This looks less like a cyclical dip than the repricing of an asset class. The median Tampa HOA fee rose 17.2% year over year in the three months ending July 31, 2024 — the steepest jump among the 43 U.S. metros Redfin analyzed, against a 5.7% median — lifting typical dues to $614 a month, ahead of Orlando (16.7%) and Fort Lauderdale (16.2%). On top of monthly dues, special assessments have run as high as $200,000 per unit for buildings facing repair bills in the millions, per a Palm Beach Post report cited by NBC News. ISG World's Craig Studnicky told Bisnow that the average 30-plus-year-old Florida condo fell from about $325,000 in 2022 to $218,000 by September 2025, with older-condo sale prices down 21% since 2023 even as condos under 10 years old gained 9%.

Not all the weakness is distress, and that complicates the median. New luxury towers such as 400 Central and Art House in downtown St. Petersburg have closed at prices that inflate headline condo averages even as older beachfront buildings sink — one reason a single 'condo price' number can mislead. The honest read is a two-speed segment: new and compliant on one track, aging and under-reserved on the other.

For owners and buyers, the signals to watch are concrete. If months of supply for Pinellas condos keeps narrowing from its 7.6-month May 2026 level toward the roughly 5.5-month balanced mark, and if the share of aging buildings that complete Phase 2 repairs rises, the discount on inspected, fully funded older condos should stabilize — the repricing would then be mostly done. If supply climbs and assessments keep landing, expect the gap in the centerpiece chart to widen further into 2027.

• Tampa MSA median condo/townhouse price, 2025: $275,000, down 6.8% year over year — Florida Realtors, Tampa MSA year-end 2025 report (released Jan. 16, 2026).
• Tampa MSA median single-family price, 2025: $400,000, down 3.0% year over year — Florida Realtors, Tampa MSA year-end 2025 report (released Jan. 16, 2026).
• Pinellas County months of supply, May 2026: 7.6 months (condos) vs. 3.7 months (single-family) — Florida Realtors / Suncoast Tampa Association of Realtors, released June 16, 2026.
• Statewide 2025 median: condo/townhouse $305,000 (−4.7%), single-family $413,990 (−1.4%) — Florida Realtors, year-end 2025 (released Jan. 16, 2026).
• Milestone inspections, 2024–2025: 8,736 Phase 1 completed, 1,575 Phase 2, 54 unsafe/uninhabitable — OPPAGA Report 26-04, FL DBPR data (July 2026).
• Florida condo units 30+ years old: ~1.1 million, 58% in eight counties including Pinellas and Hillsborough — John Burns Research and Consulting (Jan. 2025).
• Tampa median HOA fee increase: 17.2% YoY to $614/month, highest of 43 U.S. metros — Redfin (Aug. 22, 2024).