Follow the rooftops: where Florida commercial real estate demand moved in 2026

By Renan Serretiello and Christopher Taddei, founding partners of The List, Orlando, Florida. Part 2 of the Florida CRE series.

The short version

• Growth moved to the middle of the map. Florida's five fastest-growing metros from 2020 to 2025 were The Villages, Lakeland, Ocala, Port St. Lucie and Punta Gorda. Not one of them is a household name in CRE.
• Polk is the new center of gravity. It added more people than any Florida county in 2025, and the state projects another 90,000 residents there by 2030.
• In secondary markets, vacancy lives in the new big boxes. Small-bay and specialized industrial is tight. Brand new bulk warehouses are where the empty space is.
• Our new metric splits Florida in two. Industrial square feet per resident separates distribution hubs from hometown markets, and each needs a different product.
• Healthcare is the loudest demand signal. Hospitals and ERs are chasing the rooftops, and medical office trades at roughly three times the price of ordinary office in Southwest Florida.
• The risks are real and specific. Thinner exit markets, pricing that already assumes perfection, and counties squeezed on how to pay for the roads.

In part one of this series, we wrote one sentence we think matters more than any other number in Florida commercial real estate right now: rooftops lead, and the rooftops moved inland. This report is the follow-up. It goes county by county to show where the people went, what commercial space follows them, and where developers have already gotten ahead of the demand.

Here's the quiet worry a lot of investors carry: they missed Miami, they missed Tampa, and now the "next Tampa" pitch decks all look the same. Some of those decks are right. Some are selling a 2022 growth curve with a 2026 price tag. The data can tell you which is which.

The map moved

Start with the five-year view, because one year of migration data can be noisy. Here is how Florida's metros grew from the 2020 Census to the Census Bureau's 2025 estimates.

Teal bars are secondary markets; gray bars are Florida's four largest metros. Source: U.S. Census Bureau 2020 Census and Vintage 2025 estimates, as compiled by metropolitan area.

Read that chart again, slowly. The Miami metro, the one every national headline is about, grew about a fifth as fast as Lakeland. Tampa-St. Petersburg grew about a third as fast as Ocala. The metros that most CRE funds treat as "tertiary" are where Florida's population actually showed up.

The single-year numbers for 2025 say the same thing, only louder. Polk County added 23,356 residents, more than any other county in Florida, while Pinellas lost 11,834, the most of any county. By growth rate, the leaders were:

Source: U.S. Census Bureau county estimates, as published by USAFacts. Union County (+3.1%) omitted as a very small base.

Notice the pattern. Almost every top grower sits on the edge of a big metro, one county out from the core. That's not a coincidence. According to the University of Florida's Shimberg Center, about 59% of domestic newcomers to Polk and Pasco during the 2021 to 2023 surge came from other Florida counties, and the fastest-growing counties are also the ones building the most new single-family homes. People are moving to where a house still pencils, then commuting back toward the jobs.

The next five years, according to the state

Backward-looking growth is interesting. Forward-looking growth is what you underwrite. Florida's official demographers publish county projections, and they show the inland shift continuing well past 2026.

Projected population increase, April 2025 to April 2030, medium projection: Polk +89,690, Pasco +66,557, St. Johns +57,409, Lake +53,197, Marion +37,370, Pinellas +8,499. Source: Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research, county projections with April 1, 2025 estimates. State estimates use a different method than the Census figures in Figure 1, so levels differ slightly; the direction is the same.

Polk alone is expected to add roughly the population of a small city every five years, and the Lakeland Chamber puts the current pace at about 85 new residents a day. Meanwhile Pinellas, the most densely populated county in Florida and the heart of many Tampa Bay portfolios, is projected to grow by less than 1% over the same five years. If your thesis is "Tampa Bay is growing," it's worth asking which Tampa Bay.

The one rule: vacancy lives in the new big boxes

Here's the pattern we see across every inland and secondary market we track, and it's the most useful thing in this report if you're about to buy or build industrial outside the big four metros. Headline vacancy in these markets looks soft. But when you break it down by building size, age or location, the vacancy is almost entirely in one place: large, newly delivered, speculative distribution buildings. Everything else is tight.

Teal bars are small or specialized product; amber bars are large or newly built product. The Lee and Charlotte bar is plotted at 30%; the reported figure is "over 30%". Sources: Lakeland Chamber of Commerce Q1 2026 industrial snapshot; Ironmark report using CoStar data; Colliers via REBusinessOnline; Maxwell, Hendry & Simmons Market Trends 2026. Measures come from different providers and are shown to compare segments within each market, not across markets.

In Polk County, specialized industrial runs at 3.7% vacancy and East Polk at 2.8%, while logistics product sits at 8.6% and North Polk jumped to 11.3% after absorbing nearly half a million square feet of new construction. In Southwest Florida, the contrast is even starker. Industrial buildings completed in 2023 or later in Lee and Charlotte counties were more than 30% vacant, and 46% in Charlotte alone, while buildings from 2020 or earlier were essentially fully leased.

The mirror image is a shortage. Colliers' Dan Miller describes a "small-bay crisis" in Southwest Florida: years of big-box development left a void for local businesses that need 2,000 to 20,000 square feet, and developers are only now starting to fill it. Flex space in the region was asking $16.50 per square foot NNN, well above the market's $14.17 average.

The headline vacancy rate in a secondary market is mostly a measure of how many big boxes got built last year. It tells you almost nothing about a 10,000-square-foot bay.

Hub or hometown? A new way to size industrial demand

Why did so many big boxes land in markets that didn't need them? We think it's because investors treated every growing county as the same kind of industrial market. They aren't. So we built a simple test you won't find in a brokerage report: total industrial inventory divided by population.

Total industrial inventory divided by 2025 population. Inventory: Ironmark/CoStar (Polk), Agora/CoStar (Miami-Dade), Berger Commercial (Broward, Palm Beach), The List (Orlando), Colliers (Southwest Florida). Population: Census 2025 estimates. Inventory definitions vary by provider, so treat these as orders of magnitude. If Colliers' Southwest Florida inventory also covers Charlotte County, that figure falls to about 33.

The chart sorts Florida into two very different kinds of industrial market.

Distribution hubs, at 100-plus square feet per resident, store and move goods for people who don't live there. Polk sits between the Tampa and Orlando metros, which together hold about 6.4 million people, and Miami-Dade is a gateway for trade with Latin America. In a hub, the big box is the native product. Demand comes from the whole state or the whole hemisphere, not the local zip code.

Hometown markets, at 35 to 45 square feet per resident, mostly serve the people who live there: the plumber's supply house, the HVAC contractor, the cabinet shop, the last-mile van depot. Their demand grows with households, and it wants small bays, roll-up doors and a short drive to the rooftops. Build a 1-million-square-foot distribution center in a hometown market and you are betting on a national tenant choosing it over a hub an hour away. That's exactly the bet that left new Southwest Florida buildings 30% empty.

Market by market

Polk County and Lakeland: the I-4 hub that grew up

Polk is the clearest example of a hub market doing what hubs do. The county's industrial inventory is about 93.4 million square feet, roughly 78% of it logistics, with trailing-twelve-month absorption of 2.33 million square feet and average NNN asking rents near $9.48. One detail should make any investor pause, though: a single PepsiCo lease accounted for more than half of the year's absorption. Hub markets can post big absorption numbers that hinge on a handful of tenants.

CBRE describes the market as trending back toward equilibrium, with new supply largely pre-committed and developers cautious about speculative bulk construction. We'd go further: the Polk opportunity in 2026 is less about the next big box and more about the service economy that 23,000 new residents a year need. Contractor bays, medical office, and neighborhood retail along US-98, US-92 and the Polk Parkway are where the county's household growth shows up first.

Pasco County: Tampa's growth pole, priced like it knows it

Pasco is where Tampa Bay's households went. The county is projected to add about 66,000 residents by 2030, and the SR 54 and SR 56 corridor around Wesley Chapel is drawing national brands, medical practices and restaurants. Developers have noticed. Matthews notes that Pasco keeps attracting Tampa Bay's larger industrial projects because it still has the land, and Pasco received a big share of recent deliveries.

The warning sign is pricing. New Wesley Chapel retail space is being marketed at $49 to $55 per square foot, and a single-tenant Chipotle in Wesley Chapel was listed at a 4.50% cap rate. That's an asking price, not a closed trade. But a 4.5% cap on a restaurant pad sits half a point below today's 10-year Treasury. That buyer isn't paying for Pasco's growth. They're paying for Pasco's growth to be perfect.

Marion County and Ocala: the I-75 hub nobody talks about at dinner parties

Ocala grew almost 18% in five years, and it has quietly become a real distribution market sitting halfway between Jacksonville and Tampa on I-75. In 2025, the roughly 943,000-square-foot Trailhead Logistics Park reached full lease-up with a national third-party logistics operator, and a warehouse near the existing Amazon fulfillment center traded for $97.7 million. Local observers' advice for 2026 is to prioritize small-bay and flex industrial near I-75, which lines up with the pattern in Figure 3. Marion is a hub for bulk distribution and a hometown for everything else.

Osceola, Lake and Sumter: Orlando's growth ring

South and west of Orlando, the numbers are simple. Osceola grew 3.4% in a single year, and its retail vacancy was running near 2% late last year, with Lake County near 4%. The Villages metro, which covers Sumter County, was the fastest-growing metro in Florida over five years at 21.6%. Retirees drive a particular kind of demand: medical office, urgent care, pharmacy, grocery and services, not warehouses. We cover the corridor in detail on our Osceola and US-192 page and in our Orlando retail analysis.

St. Johns County: the fastest-growing county in Florida

St. Johns, just south of Jacksonville, led every Florida county with 3.9% growth in 2025, and the state projects another 57,000 residents by 2030. It is the purest example of the healthcare land rush, which gets its own section below. For CRE investors, the county's story is higher incomes, fast household formation and very little existing commercial inventory, which is a good combination for neighborhood retail and medical office and a dangerous one for anyone who overpays for land.

Southwest Florida: four markets in one

Lee, Collier and Charlotte counties are the best illustration of why "the market" is the wrong unit of analysis. Southwest Florida posted $1.6 billion of commercial transaction volume in 2025, up 14%, with retail making up 49% of it. Office vacancy runs at just 3% to 6% because the inventory is mostly small, owner-occupied buildings rather than towers. Industrial vacancy rose to 9.7% in the first quarter of 2026 from 7.2% a year earlier as about 2.4 million square feet delivered in 2025, even as NNN asking rents rose. Fort Myers holds nearly 30 million of the region's 49.6 million square feet, and the 218,000-square-foot Baker Distribution facility traded for $30 million, about $156 per square foot.

The retail story follows the rooftops almost literally. In Lehigh Acres, where about 14,000 residential units were permitted in three years, Walmart and Lowe's are planning a new anchor development on SR-82, and Publix and Home Depot will anchor Gateway Marketplace nearby. Commercial land sales in the region surged to nearly $170 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, after two quarters in the $65 to $73 million range. When land buyers move like that, they're telling you where the next five years of openings will be.

Healthcare is the loudest signal

If you want to know where Florida's population is heading before the Census tells you, watch the hospital systems. They run their own demographic models, they plan decades out, and they put real money into the ground. In 2026, they are all chasing the same counties.

• St. Johns County: UF Health opened a 99-bed hospital on a 42.5-acre campus at Durbin Park in September, the same week Baptist Health opened a new medical campus in the county. AdventHealth opened a 12-bed freestanding ER there as well, and has land in the World Commerce Center for a planned 88-bed hospital with 80,000 square feet of medical office.
• Polk County: AdventHealth topped out a 13,000-square-foot freestanding ER in Auburndale in July, citing a county population racing toward one million.
• Southwest Florida: Lee Health's $824 million hospital campus and Tampa General's expanding presence in Babcock Ranch are both driving medical office demand. Just north, Sarasota Memorial bought 120 acres at I-75 and State Road 64.

Southwest Florida office pricing, dollars per square foot, 2026: multi-tenant office recent trades $150 to $160; replacement cost of a comparable 20-year-old office $400 or more; medical office recent trades $470 to $545. Source: Maxwell, Hendry & Simmons, Market Trends 2026 presentation.

Here's the math that tells you how badly healthcare wants these locations. HCA's second freestanding ER in St. Johns County sits on two acres bought for $3.7 million, about $1.85 million an acre, with a construction cost of about $14.8 million for a 10,860-square-foot building. All in, that's roughly $1,700 per square foot for a single-story building in a suburban county. Health systems don't spend like that on hunches.

If you're evaluating this space, start with our Orlando medical office analysis.

Who pays for the roads? The squeeze coming for growth counties

Growth is expensive for the counties absorbing it, and Florida has boxed them in from two sides.

First, impact fees. Since 2021, Florida law has limited counties to raising impact fees no more than once every four years and by no more than 50%, phased in, unless they can prove "extraordinary circumstances." Counties have tried. Polk commissioned an extraordinary-circumstances study in 2024 to keep up with its growth. But a 2026 Attorney General opinion found that Nassau County's 17% population growth over five years did not qualify as extraordinary, which makes that escape hatch much narrower. A 2026 bill to tighten the rules further passed the House but died in the Senate.

Second, Amendment 3. If voters approve it on November 3, it would cut local property tax revenue by an estimated $12 billion a year statewide, while also capping annual assessment increases on commercial property at 5% instead of 10% starting in 2027. We covered the details in part one.

Put those together and fast-growing counties face a real gap between the infrastructure they need and the money they're allowed to raise. The likely pressure points are non-ad-valorem special assessments, mobility and utility fees, and slower road and utility extensions. None of that is certain, but it belongs in your underwriting, especially for ground-up development on the edge of a growth county, where the timing of a road widening can make or break a retail site.

The risks nobody puts in the pitch deck

• Exit liquidity. Fewer buyers show up for secondary-market assets, and they demand more yield. CoStar data shows Tampa's industrial market averaging about a 7.6% cap rate while South Florida industrial averaged about 5.4%. That higher yield is great going in and painful coming out if you bought at a hub price and have to sell to a secondary-market buyer.
• Tenant concentration. When one PepsiCo lease makes up more than half of a county's annual absorption, the market's momentum is only as strong as the next big user's site selection.
• Priced for perfection. A restaurant pad listed at a 4.5% cap in a growth suburb isn't a bet on growth. It's a bet that nothing goes wrong. The growth premium in the best inland corridors is already in the price.
• Storms and insurance. Southwest Florida has absorbed major hurricanes in recent years, and insurance cost is now a line item that can decide whether a deal works. Get quotes before you set a price.
• Demand that moved, not grew. As the Shimberg data shows, a lot of inland growth is Floridians relocating within the state. Inland retail wins can come at the expense of older centers in the counties those households left.

Inland market scorecard

Growth from Census estimates; projections from the Florida Office of Economic and Demographic Research. Sources for each signal are cited in the sections above.

What we'd actually do with this

If you're buying industrial outside the big four metros

Figure out whether you're in a hub or a hometown market first, using Figure 4. In a hub, buy modern bulk where you can underwrite patient lease-up. In a hometown market, look for small-bay and flex, where the shortage is real, and demand a steep discount on any big box delivered since 2023.

If you're buying retail

Follow the anchors and the permits. New Publix, Walmart, Costco and Home Depot sites are the most reliable map of where rooftops are about to be. Stay disciplined on price: in the hottest corridors, the growth is already in the cap rate. Our Cap Rate Index tracks Central Florida yields by corridor.

If you're a medical or healthcare user

Move early. Once a hospital system announces a campus, land within a short drive reprices. Owner-users should compare buying with SBA 504 financing against leasing in a new medical office building before the orbit fills in.

If you're a developer

Build what the market type needs, not what the last cycle built. Underwrite impact fees and infrastructure timing as if Amendment 3 passes, and confirm road and utility capacity before you close on land. Our deal calculators can help you stress-test a pro forma.

If you're exchanging into Florida

Inland markets offer higher going-in yields than the coast, which can make 1031 math work. Just price the exit honestly. Our 1031 replacement property playbook covers timing and target property types.

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The Florida CRE series

1. Florida commercial real estate, fall 2026: what the numbers actually say
2. Follow the rooftops: Florida's inland markets (you're here)
3. Florida's CRE debt reckoning: where the distress is, and isn't

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This report is for general information and education. It is not investment, legal, tax or insurance advice. Market data comes from third-party sources believed to be reliable but not independently verified, and conditions change quickly. Talk to qualified professionals about your specific situation before making a decision.