In wealthy Boca and Delray, the rich are getting richer – where does that leave the rest?

The COVID-19 pandemic fueled a historic migration of wealth to Palm Beach County. That influx of money is transforming the style, landscape, and fortunes of our area, with some communities more and more resembling the tony town of Palm Beach. The migration will bring changes and challenges. This is one part of a Palm Beach Post multi-part series titled The Palm Beaching Project. Go here for more stories in the series.

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June 17 was supposed to be a routine Monday for suburban Boca Raton resident Dora Ferreira and her family of four.

Then she received a call from her landlord telling her the townhouse her family had rented for eight years had been listed for sale.

“I’m sorry,” Ferreira remembers the landlord telling her and her husband. “But I put it on the market. The showing is going to start on July 10.” The townhouse is being sold for $400,000.

The family was given until the beginning of August to leave the house, where they have resided for eight years, paying a modest $2,500 in rent the past year for the property. They don’t know what will come next — with the rising cost of living in Palm Beach County, particularly the expensive Boca Raton-Delray Beach area, finding an affordable three-bedroom space to rent is no easy task.

When the pandemic hit Palm Beach County, the transplants started bidding bars

For years, Boca Raton, and to a larger extent its neighbor to the north Delray Beach, has been known for its influx of money and transplants from the north.

But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and more, wealthier people decided to make South Florida their permanent home. Ferreira’s real estate agent, Deniz Kilic, remembers in 2020, especially, how many New Yorkers were looking to buy homes. Houses were staying on the market for less than 24 hours, she said. And bidding wars were rampant.

Kilic said things started to settle down when the interest rates increased around the end of 2023.

Current rates in Boca Raton are 6.83% for a 30-year fixed loan, 5.93% for a 15-year fixed loan and 7.27% for a 5-year adjustable-rate mortgage, according to Realtor.com.

Still, Boca Raton, at $37.3 billion, continues to have the highest taxable value in the county. Delray Beach is fifth with a taxable value of $18 billion.

“It’s really difficult,” Kilic, who’s worked as a Realtor in South Florida since 2016, said. “I’m seeing that people who buy will find the neighborhood they want, but, unfortunately, they may have to venture out a little bit more and make that sacrifice to get that home.”

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Boca Raton is one of the county’s wealthiest cities, with an average household income of $88,820 and rising. According to Forbes Magazine, Boca Raton has three of the 10 most expensive gated communities in the U.S. In the past three years, the population saw a 2.76% increase and as a business center, the city also experiences large daytime population increases.

“I personally feel that,” said Kilic, the Realtor, who lives in Delray Beach. Though she’s not looking to move, she acknowledges the increase in property values, even just by looking at her own condo, which has more than doubled in price since she bought it in 2016.

“It’s much harder, especially with higher interest rates, for people to buy.” And it’s a reason why so many families, like the Ferreiras, will resort to renting a property for years on end.

When housing prices rise, normally rents also go up in Boca Raton and Palm Beach County

Usually when home sales surge, so do rents.

In the past few years, Boca Raton and Delray Beach have been among the nation’s top places seeing the greatest rise in rent values, according to a survey by Insurify, a homeowners insurance-rate comparison tool.

Dora Ferreira, 43, found the deposits landlords seek these days to be one of the most difficult parts of her family’s search for a new home. Every three-bedroom apartment or house she has found in the area costs at least $3,200 per month. That’s almost $1,000 more than the $2,500 her family pays in rent now for the townhouse they’re giving up.

But many rental companies in the area, Ferreira said, are asking for three months of rent just to secure the property. With current rent rates, that means putting down around $10,000 for a family the size of Ferreira’s. It’s something they hadn’t anticipated.

Ferreira has also found property management companies — such as Invitation Homes, based in Florida — are asking for monthly fees she hadn’t previously heard of. One, for instance, is a $40 monthly fee to have a Ring security camera installed at the front door.

“I never saw that before,” Ferreira said. “I don’t know who’s going to be watching us all the time. I don’t understand why we’d have to pay a monthly fee to have a Ring on the door.”

Because one of her daughters will be a sophomore at Spanish River High School, Ferreira wants to stay in Boca Raton. “The last three years of high school are the most important,” Ferreira said. “Because of college, you need good grades.”

Ferreira’s daughter knows many of the teachers at Spanish River High School. It’s where all of her friends are, too. Ferreira is afraid of the mental and academic toll starting at a new school in the fall would take on her daughter, she said.

Her other daughter, a few years older, just finished her freshman year of college. But she often visits home and would need to live there during the summers, hence Ferreira’s three-bedroom search.

Ferreira’s husband works in the pool industry, so he’s often driving around, even beyond Boca Raton. But Ferreira has her own ties to the city. She works at a beauty salon in east Boca as an eyelash technician. Right now, it takes her about 15 minutes to drive to work.

If her family were to move south, say, to Coconut Creek in Broward County, where properties are a bit more affordable, the commute would double. And her daughter’s school district would change.

Ferreira, unsure about where her family will go, considered downsizing, if not moving farther away.

“Probably, I’m going to have to give a lot of my stuff away,” she said.

Jasmine Fernández is a journalist covering Delray Beach and Boca Raton for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at jfernandez@pbpost.com and follow her on X (formerly Twitter) at @jasminefernandz. Help support our work. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Boca, Delray’s real estate boom, many residents need affordable housing

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