Ron Myers, president of Ron Buys Florida Homes, has spent more than two decades buying and selling residential properties across Florida. What he is seeing on the ground today looks nothing like the market conditions that made fix-and-flip deals profitable just a few years ago.
When Appreciation Masked Risk
Myers started in the mortgage business before migrating into retail real estate as an agent. Over coffee with a friend, he began exploring a different model: buying distressed homes directly from sellers, including properties in foreclosure, homes behind on taxes, inherited properties that had been neglected, and houses whose owners needed to move quickly without the friction of a traditional listing.
Myers focuses on fix-and-flip, assignments, and wholesaling, averaging around four deals a month. His operation is small by design, with his son helping handle day-to-day work as Myers learns what the current market demands before expanding further.
The deals that worked in 2021 and 2022 no longer pencil out the same way. At that time, Myers says, investors could afford to pay near estimated market value because the market was improving and the direction was clear. Rising prices absorbed renovation delays, carrying costs, and minor underwriting errors. The math was forgiving.
It no longer is. Florida, and the Gulf Coast in particular, is now in a down market. Values are falling, not rising. What an investor pays for a property today may be higher than what the same property fetches in three months.
Time on Market Now Decides Profit
In a declining market, time becomes the central variable. Every month a property sits, whether under renovation or listed for sale, generates holding costs: financing, insurance, taxes, utilities, and management. Myers has shifted his evaluation window accordingly.
Rather than working within a six-month outlook, Myers now focuses on recent comparable sales, current listings, and how long those listings have been sitting. If similar homes are taking six to eight months to sell, pricing aggressively to exit faster often makes more sense than holding out for a higher number that carrying costs will erode.
Rising costs on both ends compound the problem. Materials and labor are significantly more expensive than they were several years ago. Investors who once had comfortable margins between acquisition price, renovation cost, and resale value are finding those margins compressed or eliminated entirely.
Thin Buyer Pool Prolongs Exits
Even a correctly priced property faces a thinner buyer pool than it would have a few years ago. Move-up buyers, meaning homeowners who might otherwise sell and purchase a larger renovated property, are largely staying put. Myers says these buyers are sticking it out and making their existing homes work because mortgage rates are much different than they were.
Holding periods have stretched well beyond what many investors initially planned. Properties that investors expected to sell within weeks are now sitting for five or six months, long enough to turn a profitable deal into a break-even or a loss. Fewer buyers extend time on market, which increases carrying costs and further compresses margins.
Myers also pushes back on the idea that lower interest rates would solve the problem. In his view, a return to 3% rates would drive prices even higher in an already unaffordable market, repeating the same cycle when rates rise again. What the market needs is for prices to come down, not for financing costs to drop.
How Investors Are Adapting
These pressures have forced Myers to overhaul how he evaluates deals. He now compresses his evaluation window, scrutinizes time-on-market data more carefully, and prices acquisitions conservatively to account for values potentially being lower at exit than at purchase.
“Time on market is key because there are a lot of holding costs,” Myers says. He is also finding ways to reduce renovation spend without sacrificing marketability, refurbishing cabinetry rather than replacing it, preserving usable flooring, and targeting upgrades that move buyers without inflating budgets.
Whether the Florida residential market stabilizes or continues to soften, the shift Myers describes, from momentum-based underwriting to conservative, time-sensitive deal analysis, may represent the new baseline for fix-and-flip investors who want to remain active in the state.