Buying Tampa Bay
Buying Tampa Bay
S2 E2. Navigating Florida's Post-Hurricane Housing Market
One month after Hurricanes Hela and Milton, the Buying Tampa Bay Podcast hosts Peter Murphy and Chase Clark, along with guest Connor Kincaid, discuss the aftermath of the storms and their effects on the Tampa Bay housing market. They cover topics such as insurance coverage (or lack thereof), the permitting and rebuilding process, and the devastating impact on homeowners. They also discuss the unexpected nature of the storms, the inadequate public infrastructure, and the importance of community support in times of crisis
For all your Real Estate Investment and Property Management needs check out HomeProp!
https://www.homeprop.com
https://www.HomepropPM.com
Hello and welcome to the Buying Tampa Bay podcast. We're your hosts, peter Murphy and Chase Clark, and we have Connor Kincaid with us as a guest on the show today. So welcome to the show, connor. Just over one month ago, the west coast of Florida, including Tampa Bay, was hit by a Cat 3 hurricane. One week prior, a Cat 4, helene, struck Florida's Big Bend. Each storm, helene and Milton brought with it catastrophic storm surge and winds, and for millions of Florida residents it was a first in a recent memory run-in with a major hurricane. One month later, we're well into the recovery efforts and for most of us life has returned to some semblance of normalcy. But lessons have been learned and humility has certainly been doled out, and we're here today to share some information with you in the aftermath of the recovery efforts of Milton and Helene, as well as how these storms have affected the Tampa Bay housing market. So, chase, great to be back with you. Man, what a month.
Chase Clark:Yeah, exactly, it's been a crazy month. It's hard to even keep the timeline straight, can't believe that it's been a month, and the first 10 days or so of this month were quite crazy because of the storms. So many things to talk about today related to that, especially now in hindsight, being able to get a little bit more clarity about what happened and what the aftermath really looks like. So looking forward to talking about that today.
Peter Murphy:Great and Connor, welcome to the show to you as well. Tell us a little bit about yourself so the audience can get to know you.
Conor Kincaid:Yeah, it's good to be here with you guys. So I'm a student at Florida College studying finance, so these are some topics that are pretty close to my heart and going along with some of the things that I'm learning, and I'm thankful for the opportunity to be with you guys today.
Peter Murphy:Well, we're really glad to have you, and you've probably pulled yourself right in at a great time, because, as soon as these storms hit, what was on top of everyone's mind was the whole insurance market. And well, so what have we been discovering so far about insurance, as we've watched our friends and our clients go through the damage process, now the adjustment process. Well, tell us a little bit about what we've been experiencing there, and have their insurance tools paid out. Has that made their lives easier? What have they discovered from their insurance? Tell us a little bit about that.
Conor Kincaid:Right. So there's a couple of different factors, and one of the main factors is it's under Florida law that each home insurance will cover wind damages from a hurricane, so like shingles coming off of the roof. Anything in that regard would be covered under Florida law by their homeowner's insurance policy. But the unfortunate thing is just a normal home insurance policy does not cover flood damages and, as we can see from the aftermath of the storm, that's been a majority of the damages caused here. So it would take an extra flood policy to have that covered under the insurance, under the insurance. So what we're seeing is a lot of these homeowners, or even tenants, are not insured properly, so maybe we can talk about how to bring some awareness to that as well.
Chase Clark:Yeah, that's. One of the unique things about these storms is that, especially with Milton, we saw catastrophic flooding here in the Tampa Bay area and areas that are not typically flood prone and where people are not in designated flood zones and so, therefore, they're not required to have flood insurance and many of them don't most of them don't, I would say and the effects of the flooding that came after, you know, we had Helene come through and and then you know, a week later we have Milton come through, which is something that I don't think anybody expected. We haven't seen flooding like this in my lifetime around here and many of the lifetimes of some of the older people that have been in these areas for 30, 40, 50 years. Some even said that this is like a 200 year flood in some of these areas, and so not just the 100 year flood level, but the 200 year flood level, whatever that might be. I think we saw it this time and unfortunately, as you said, so many people were left uninsured, with tons of damage to their homes.
Peter Murphy:Yeah, and it's interesting, right, because it's not like folks hadn't bought insurance, like everyone I know, because most folks have loans on their homes, have had to buy some form of insurance, and so they bought this as educated as they thought they were with whatever insurance components made them feel safe and satisfy their lenders.
Peter Murphy:And then this major storm event comes around and I think what was the most shocking for me, what was the most shocking for many of our clients, is that, after all the premiums that they have been paying, their coverage just didn't include anywhere close to what they thought it would include. And, for example, like the folks who had hurricane coverage and thought they had a satisfactory level of hurricane coverage, of course, when your roof is damaged and shingles are blown off it, well before that insurance policy pays out, you've got a really hefty hurricane deductible that's got to be applied first, and in many cases that hurricane deductible is so staggeringly large that there isn't coverage paying out. There is no insurance paying out for many of these smaller hurricane-related damages that are happening to homes, and folks are shocked because they thought they had coverage enough to pay for the damages when they arrived.
Conor Kincaid:Yeah, I think. Another nuance that I noticed is, like I mentioned earlier, even if they had a hurricane, wind coverage that does to an extent cover some water damage in the house, but you have to prove that the water damage was caused because of the wind damage. So, for instance, if your roof gets blown off because of the wind and then rain damages everything in the house, and then rain damages everything in the house that would be covered under a normal homeowner policy, but not flooding that comes up from the bottom or from the pond in your backyard, that sort of thing.
Chase Clark:Yeah, that's right. You know, and I don't know if people recognize this reality all the time, when they sign up for their homeowner's insurance or decide to buy a policy, that hurricane deductible is anywhere from like two to 5% of the insured value of your home the replacement cost value and so you're talking about premiums that can be anywhere from in this case, in this market, typically six to twenty thousand dollars for just the deductible related to wind damage, and that deductible kicks in any time. There's a named storm. It can be a tropical storm, it can be a hurricane. If there's a name associated with that storm, then that larger than normal deductible applies Outside of that wind event from a named storm. Most of our deductibles are $1,000, $1,500, $2,500, maybe $5,000, even on the high end, $500, maybe $5,000, even on the high end, and so you're talking about a significant difference in the amount of money you'll receive from the insurance company for damages because of that name storm, hurricane deductible element. And there are many differences in what it will actually cover.
Chase Clark:But one of the big ones I saw on this was even people with flood insurance separate from homeowners people that had a flood insurance policy don't realize that there's two aspects to it. One is structural and one is contents, and so we saw so many people in this area have their homes flooded out completely Structurally. There wasn't a ton of damage necessarily. You're talking drywall, you're talking carpet, you're talking soft wood surfaces, cabinets, things like that. But the bulk of the expense for these people are their possessions, their contents that they'd have to now replace their furniture, their clothing, their beds, their you know, all of the things that you know. Sometimes you don't add up on a list how much that stuff might be worth or how much it might cost you to replace the contents.
Chase Clark:Most people aren't required to have contents flood coverage, even if you're in a flood zone. They're just required to have the structural element. And these weren't the kinds of floods like we saw in North Carolina with Helene, where water was racing down mountains and literally sweeping up houses and cars and moving them down the street. This was water that was slowly rising an inch or two every hour until it finally infiltrated the interior of these homes and sat there for three, four, five days. Some of these homes up in Dade City along the Withlacoochee River still have water sitting in them a month later along the Withlacoochee River, still have water sitting in them a month later, and so the contents portion of the flood policy became very important for people to have no-transcript.
Peter Murphy:It's been really devastating to watch.
Peter Murphy:Any community that goes through something like this experiences, I think, a little bit of what we have here, and that's that day after the storm you've got that shock event where your home has standing water in it and you're doing everything you can to save your personal belongings, and then that water subsides, hopefully, and you're then faced with that insurance adjuster and that conversation with your insurance agent and what just so many people are finding out is that there's just inadequate dollars in their insurance payout potential to get them anywhere close to being made right again.
Peter Murphy:And so you've got some other wonderful safety nets that have kicked in. Here in Tampa there have been wonderful social support that we've seen coming from people's church groups and extended networks. We've seen GoFundMe campaigns that have been created to help bridge the gaps. We've seen FEMA kick in just a little bit with some of the flood damage to homes I mean not much, but it's there and of course then small amounts of insurance in the event that someone truly had a flood policy. But so much of this recovery effort is falling square on the shoulders of the homeowners themselves and that they're having to pay for that cost out of pocket. It's really devastating to watch, and so our hearts go out to everyone who's been affected by this.
Chase Clark:Yeah, our neighborhood that we live in was hit really bad by flooding from Baker Creek and we have some good friends that were flooded out of their home and one of the most shocking things that was revealed to them during the process of talking to the adjuster for their flood policy is that, by law, these adjusters have 45 days in which to get their reports done and submitted to the insurance company. 45 days, I mean, that's an incredible amount of time when you're talking about being displaced from your home, having your stuff completely flooded out, having nowhere to go. And FEMA does step in to some extent, but there's lodging reimbursement. They were putting people up in hotels, but it was for a very finite period of time, and so if your adjuster takes 45 days to submit your damage report to the insurance company and then they take a week or two to turn around and issue you a check, some people are going to be two months into the devastation of this before they can even begin to hire contractors to come in and start repairing their homes.
Peter Murphy:Can even begin to hire contractors to come in and start repairing their homes, right.
Peter Murphy:Yeah, that's what we've seen, and you're definitely living with some friends for a while if that's where you are down here.
Peter Murphy:So it's been kind of a nice communal living opportunity, but certainly unexpected, you know, and maybe we should pay a little bit of attention to that idea of the unexpected nature of this.
Peter Murphy:You know, the Tampa Bay area hadn't been hit by a direct storm in about 100 years. We'd had a storm that had come close and we've had storms that have kind of cut through the peripheries of the greater Tampa area, but Tampa proper had not received a direct hit and there was a wobble at the end of this storm's trajectory which brought it a little bit south of us. And so once again, we were spared the brunt of what it could have been. When Hurricane Milton came through, hurricane Helene didn't even come through, she sat in the Gulf of Mexico and brought storm surge that devastated our coastal lands and swept away our dunes, washed away our beaches. So in both of these cases we were just left, I think, staggered at the power and the potential destructive energy of these storms and grateful, to an extent, that we didn't receive the full brunt of them. It was just something to watch.
Chase Clark:Yeah, no doubt. For years, decades, even now, people have tried to speculate why do these storms turn right? And for us a little bit north, they did. Sorry for the people down in sarasota, osprey, venice area that got hit directly by this storm. Um tampa bay, for whatever reason, doesn't have one, like you said, go up the mouth of the bay in 100 years that we know of on record, and had this storm done that, can you only imagine what the impact would have been like then, because I've lived in Florida my whole life and I can tell you that, being in the area just northeast of where Milton hit, you know it's just the worst, probably worst damage, worst wind field, worst sustained winds that I've experienced in any storm here in Florida so far.
Peter Murphy:Well, talk a little bit about the construction realities you've seen. We've mentioned that that was where everyone is right now. They're in the midst of the reconstruction from the damages. And how has that looked? How have supplies been trending and vendors and the permitting process, and what have we all seen about that? Let's share on that a little bit.
Chase Clark:Yeah, one thing that's been very interesting is if you watch the news every night, they're trying to keep people informed about permitting processes throughout different municipalities around the Bay Area and they're all just slightly different. You know, the first thing that most people did, especially if you were flooded out, was to get your place dried out as fast as you can. Get the drywall cut no higher than four feet up on the wall, unless you had flooding that exceeded that. But most people did not. Get the fans in there, the dehumidifiers, get the sanitation done for whatever kind of bacteria and mold growth may have infiltrated your home or may be starting to grow on your two by fours on the back of your drywall. Get your place secured.
Chase Clark:Get your electric turned off if it wasn't already hopefully it was off before it flooded. Get your water pipe secured all of those kinds of things. That's the first initial step to getting on the road to recovery, and most people were pretty effective at getting that done, just by driving through some of these neighborhoods and seeing the amount of drywall cabinets and soft woods that were sitting on the curb and, again, thankful to FEMA, they've been on top of it, coming by and picking this stuff up very quickly, but getting that initial dryout process done to a flooded home is critically important. We need to get that done in the first couple of days in order to ensure that we don't have more extensive mold growth or bacteria in the house than probably we want to deal with.
Peter Murphy:And then we've discovered, of course, as you mentioned earlier, that the permitting processes are pretty wildly different in every place, and what I've seen is that folks have not allowed that to really interrupt their initial storm recovery efforts. They've had to do much of this work on their own, they've had to hustle to get their properties cleaned out and dried out as soon as possible, and, you know, in some cases they've been pushing through as fast as they can to get their homes recovered and restored. And well, so have we seen problems related to that.
Chase Clark:Yeah, you know, I don't know about enforcement right now. As far as those that are choosing to go it alone versus go through the process of permitting, there's warnings everywhere about it. You need to get a permit. In certain areas you can do up to two feet of drywall repair without a permit, and some places you've got to get a permit no matter what for everything that you're going to do, lining up contractors and getting those permits pulled. The municipalities have promised to expedite the permit pull process.
Chase Clark:Some have even waived fees for people with storm damage, but I think the bottleneck right now that I see happening is that so many people are going after the same vendors and their time and resource constraint, and so some of them are being told that they can't even start their projects for two to three months.
Chase Clark:You layer on top of that potential supply chain issues.
Chase Clark:You can only imagine the demand that's being put right now on two by fours and drywall and cabinets and countertops and things like that.
Chase Clark:Home Depot and Lowe's have been very busy.
Chase Clark:I'm sure their stock price is going to show that this quarter, at least for this area, it's been a really good thing for them. But I think long term, I think the process is taking longer and probably going to cost more than people expect, and so that's why, when you get your initial offer from your insurance company, it's critical that you match that up with what your vendor or what your contractor is saying that they will contract to do your job for your complete restoration, because you don't want to accept a number from the insurance company and then be left holding the bag two, three months later because they didn't send you enough money and now your contractor has overages or the cost of materials has gone up and he's making you or she's making you eat that cost. So it's a fine balance and it's kind of a game you have to play with your insurance right now as to how much money they're going to give you and what it's actually going to cost you at the end of this to have your house restored.
Peter Murphy:Right. It's a big possible gap in those two pieces of information and fortunately, if you've got a good insurance agent, someone advises you in this. They're giving you that information. You may want to push back strong because of the likely reality that costs in both labor and materials are going to go way up from wherever it is that you thought you're going to be paying for the job. So lots of interesting moving parts there for those of us who are caught up in that.
Peter Murphy:And boy, we are caught up in a lot of it. We've heard about a lot of stories already of people in certain housing markets, certainly down in St Pete and communities like Shore Acres, which are badly flooded in many of the parts of town that receive substantial flooding in the interior of people's homes. We're hearing stories all the time of folks who are just walking away right, and those are making the news. They're splashy stories right now. What kind of impact are we predicting this is going to have on the housing market? Are we seeing a lot of deals like this hit the market, where people are just walking away and selling for cash just to leave, or is this reality a little overspun right now?
Chase Clark:Well, I don't know that. We have any specific raw data yet. It may be too soon to see how many people actually up and leave. Like you mentioned, you can watch the news every night and there's always one or two people on the news that are like oh, I'm out of here, I'm done, right, and I'll tell you what, if I lived in Shore Acres, I'd be done too. I mean, those people have flooded every year for the past three years, so they're either looking at this as hey, we're very seasoned in dealing with this process, or this is the worst place ever to live and we got to go.
Chase Clark:Now. You've got some issues with that, though. Right, you got people trying to sell houses that have been gutted, you know, and so you got to have a special kind of buyer for that. That's not going to qualify for traditional financing. You got to have an investor that can come in and pay cash for a house like that to just walk away now and sell it as is. It's in a situation where it probably can't be financed and it's going to require a cash investor coming in to swoop it up, and that's going to demand a very good low price.
Peter Murphy:It was a tale of two construction standards to some degree, and what we saw in these flood prone areas I mean properties that have been built over the last 20 years, that have been built over the last 20 years, that have been built with the right kind of elevation above the floodplain generally fared quite well. They didn't have living areas on the lower level, they had garages or decks, and although those garages might've gotten some water in them and their pools got full of sand, the home itself is habitable and is well on its way to restoration and rehabilitation at this point. But then you've got the older homes that were built right at that, right at grade, without the kind of elevation that would have kept them free from that storm surge. And those are the homes where I think we're going to have sellers who really need to do some soul searching on what the future of that product is for them. You know you can rebuild it just as it it is if not more than 50% of it has been damaged, and that's a very important if right An adjuster who determines that more than 50% of a home has been damaged, that owner is then obliged to raise that home to current construction standards, and so we could see some considerable costs associated with that reality. But let's say that a person hasn't received that kind of a death sentence for their home. They still have to consider whether or not, just a few years from now, they're going to be faced with this exact same scenario all over again.
Peter Murphy:And so how often is too often for you to have to start from scratch with your home? Is it once every 10 years, when a flood comes through and you got to gut it and rebuild it? Is that too much for you? Or how? About once every 20 years? I don't know. For me, that number is a really low number. I don't want to have to do that very much in my lifetime. So I wonder what people are going to do who are faced with now the reality that their home is flooded out. It could happen again because I'm not rebuilding it. Now what am I going to do about my home? How am I going to keep it? I'm going to try and sell it and get out from under the potential loss of this.
Chase Clark:It's a tough question, I think, that homeowners are having to grapple with right now. Yeah, and I think, at the end of the day, it comes down to location. Right, People are still living on the beach, People are still living in older homes on the beach. People are not shying away from these areas that they know have a high propensity for flooding like this and the ones that did actually flood in both storms. Talk about areas in Tampa like Davis Island and Beach Park. Even Shore Acres is a highly desirable location in Pinellas County, and so these homeowners are making the decision okay, well, do I walk away? Do I move to high ground? What do I do?
Chase Clark:And quite often, if you're in the right location, there are developers that want your dirt, and so they're more than happy to come in and scrape your house off the ground, maybe even buy two or three lots together at the same time and build a nice multimillion dollar home in one of these highly desirable areas. I mean, when you're talking about Davis Island, you've seen this for the last several decades, this process of tearing down the old and building the new. And, anecdotally, I've been told that most of the new stuff on Davis Island didn't really flood, but the old stuff was completely underwater. Same thing down in Beach Park. You've got very nice older homes down there that are now being checkerboarded inside of these multimillion dollar multi-story homes, and I think you know that. That if you want to call it gentrification, I don't know and these, some of these neighborhoods are so nice it's hard to think about them gentrifying further, but I mean that will be the next layer or next step that we see in some of these really desirable locations.
Peter Murphy:Yeah, I think it's highly likely that anything that flooded out, especially in these highly desirable communities, those owners who do sell new construction, will come in and we're going to see a major increase in the value and the overall value of these housing markets when they're rebuilt with construction that can withstand 8 and 10 foot storm surges, which, if this is a 200 year storm, the storm surge that we experienced from Hurricane Helene was probably in the six to eight foot height zone and that could be as substantial as we see it for the well, for the many of our lifetimes.
Peter Murphy:And so it's possible that we've experienced some of the worst that could have been thrown at us over these last few years. Granted, it didn't come up in the mouth of Tampa Bay and we get that right, so that could be worse, but we saw a pretty bad storm and well, most of us did really well and certainly most homes that were built in modern construction standards did really well. And that's saying something for the Florida building code, because we've put a lot of energy and effort into that. We've rewritten it in substantial and almost total after Hurricane Andrew almost 30 years ago and now we've got a code that really withstood quite well to the ravages of the storm and of the flood, and so you know, kudos to the planners for doing quite well with some of that.
Chase Clark:Yeah, I think from a wind standpoint that's true. Right, most of the building code was rewritten based on wind speed. So impact windows, impact doors, roof straps, all of those kinds of things were updated after Hurricane Andrew. Concrete block with reinforced rebar and concrete things like that. All of that stuff is wind related.
Chase Clark:The thing I think that is going to come out of this these two storms together is some revision to where the floodplains are and how, and maybe a reassessment of how we handle stormwater.
Chase Clark:We looked around the city of Tampa, hillsborough County, both public and private retention areas, and the number of pumps that are required to keep the water flowing and the number of pump failures that occurred at critical times during these storms that caused some homes to flood out that have never flooded before or that shouldn't have flooded, because there were these mitigating systems in place.
Chase Clark:Yet the systems failed, and so how do we handle stormwater going forward?
Chase Clark:How do we handle 12 inches of rain in a three or four hour period? You know how do we handle this in the midst of an area that's continually growing, with increased development going on all the time, people building things on top of areas where water used to go, and the engineers say we're accounting for this. Swift Mud says they're requiring planning for this and all the new development going on to get a permit to build anything. But I think what we saw in this storm is either a failure in the assessment, the failure in planning or the failure in the execution of actually requiring developers to do what the engineers thought they were going to do. And then, secondary to that, we've got failure of government in some of these areas just to monitor and maintain their pumping stations that are required to be able to live in an area like this, very close to sea level, and especially at a time when we're going to get storms that dump that much rain and water on our surface in a very short period of time.
Peter Murphy:Chase, while you've been talking, I've been thinking about how many newer home construction communities flooded during this storm, and I don't have clear data on this, so it's going to be a little bit of a guess, but I can't think of any right. What I think of are there are some older communities located near new communities that flooded horribly, as though the impact from that development flooded out the old stuff right. Or the old communities that have retention ponds that also have pumps on them because, over the course of time. Or the old communities that have retention ponds that also have pumps on them because, over the course of time, they've realized that that retention structure is inadequate and they need to pump out some water into some of the other city or other retention areas around it. That failed with a high incidence. But did we see, do you have any recollection of newer construction communities that also flooded?
Conor Kincaid:Well, I live in a smaller community here, but it's brand new. It was just developed in potentially late 2023, 2024. And we had almost no damage. We had some wind damage with some fencing we still haven't with some fencing. We still haven't got the fencing repaired yet in the neighborhood. But directly across the road was an older neighborhood and just down the road, another neighborhood that was almost completely devastated with flooding, and a lot of those had to do with, like you've been talking about, those retention ponds.
Chase Clark:And so that's definitely an area of interest. Yeah, I think in all the stories I've seen covered on the news there's only one community that I'm aware of, and I believe it's down in the South Hillsborough County near Waimama, that did have some flooding due to, I believe the community was still under construction, so they failed to unblock some of the stormwater drains prior to the storm and had some minor flooding there. And then you've got a community, I believe down in the Lakewood Ranch area in Bradenton that is a newer community built in the last two or three years, that did have some flooding and I think that was related to a pump issue with their retention system. But by and large, like Connor said, like you mentioned, it is the older communities that are bearing the brunt of the new development impacts to stormwater.
Peter Murphy:Well, that's really unfortunate, I mean because I don't think we're probably accounting for that cost at all in the construction process. If new construction is coming through and it's increasing the likelihood that some of our older communities are going to flood out because of how they're built out, then well, that's something that most certainly ought to come out in the review process of these storms, because that's certainly a cost that the owners in those old communities are not going to be able to bear when they find themselves flooded out because of whatever industrial warehouse was put up beside them with inadequate drainage. So it'll be interesting to see where all that trends and what legislations emerge. So far it's pretty quiet, right. So it's only been a month since the storm and I think people are afraid to add insult to injury, but the rumblings of that are quiet for now.
Peter Murphy:People are still scrambling hard to rebuild and there's a lot of the stories that we've heard about. You know what has gone on with that. We're still pulling trees off of houses, we're still finding people who have been staying with friends for three and four weeks now and they're finally now getting themselves into some long-term temporary but long-term living arrangements because they've got a long road ahead of them to rebuild their homes, and the owners of these properties, if they're rentals, have got a lot of work to do before their homes can be re-rented again. We've got short-term rental communities on the beaches which are still several months out from being able to open up again because their pools are still damaged and the restaurants up and down the streets are still closed. We've got stories of long term restaurants that were popular and highly desirable and they've closed now because of lack of business and will not reopen. So the total cost, both like dollar wise and psychologically, of these kind of events just can't be understated. It's a huge and destructive event and something worth pause and reflecting about, for sure.
Chase Clark:Yeah, it sure is. There's been a couple incredible things too that we've seen during this storm. You brought one up a little while ago about neighbors stepping in to help neighbors and friends helping friends, and you know, in this area, the broader Christian community stepping in to help other Christians, and that's been one of the most positive and impactful things we've seen in a storm like this. And you know we see these stories all the time. You know, no matter where the devastation comes, throughout the country people step up, people step in to help bridge the gap and you know it's.
Chase Clark:It's really encouraging to see that because when you're going through something like this, you know most of the time the burden feels like it's all on you. You're waiting for an insurance payout, you're waiting for this, you're waiting for that. You've got to clean up your yard, you've got to handle this problem, that problem, and just having someone else or a small group of people come to just pick up the limbs in your yard, to help you, chainsaw through your driveway to pressure wash, you know your garage out that's been flooded or something like that, really softens the blow for a lot of this stuff and works to build community and hopefully what we'll see in the end is yeah, there's been economic impact that's been devastating to this area whether it's restaurant closures, business closures, short-term rental, shutdowns temporarily and things like that but hopefully the end result of all of this is a stronger community because of what we've done to help each other get through this storm.
Peter Murphy:Yeah, we do always seem to come back stronger, the communities that are affected by tragedies like this, and so we're hoping for that as well, and we're hoping for a quiet end of the hurricane season. As we speak, hurricane Rafael is turning in the Caribbean. It's just blitzed Cuba and shut down that poor country again, closed down all power in that country, but its trajectory appears to have changed and it's heading now away from the US mainland back toward the Yucatan Peninsula. So prayers are with the guys down in Mexico as they deal with that head-on collision and hopefully that will be the last of it for the 2024 hurricane season, which will definitely be a storm that will go down in the history books.
Chase Clark:Yeah, no doubt we can all thank Raphael for stealing our fall weather too, giving us 90 degrees with 100% humidity and making it feel really swampy here for the middle of November in Central Florida.
Peter Murphy:Yes, Many thanks to it. Right and Connor, thanks to you for your hard work through the storm and for keeping tabs in the insurance industry for us.
Conor Kincaid:Yeah, it's been good discussing these issues with you guys, yep, and we'll be back soon.
Peter Murphy:We've a lot to talk about. New opportunities will emerge, new chances to help and to serve, new chances to make money in real estate. These sorts of things always tend to be somewhat Phoenix events for us, and you know, you come back out of the ashes with great new opportunities. So until next time we'll be hopefully prepared to talk about some of those. It's a it's bye for now for me.
Chase Clark:Yeah, stay tuned when maybe we hit up what the election impact is going to be on real estate here in the next couple of weeks.