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In March, the median FOMC participant projected a lower policy rate by year-end. By June, the median projected a higher one. Last Wednesday three of them formally dissented in favor of hiking. Mortgage rates are higher now than when they voted. If your Florida decision is parked waiting for rate relief, that is your answer.

FL Real Estate Insider — August 3, 2026
By Luis Noronha

On July 29 the FOMC held its target range at 3.50%–3.75%. The vote was 9–3, and all three dissenters — Beth M. Hammack, Neel Kashkari and Lorie K. Logan — “preferred to raise the target range for the federal funds rate by 1/4 percentage point at this meeting.” (Federal Reserve — FOMC statement, July 29, 2026)

Read that again. Not one official dissented for a cut. Three dissented for a hike.

None of it should have been a surprise. The document that said so came out on June 17, and I’ve seen almost no coverage of it in this industry.

Start with the scoreboard, not the forecast

Here is what Freddie Mac’s 30-year fixed average did across 2026:

→ January 15: 6.06%
→ February 26: 5.98% — the low of the year
→ July 30: 6.66% — the high of the year, and the most recent print

(Freddie Mac — PMMS; historical archive)

Seven months into a year I expected to bring relief, the 30-year sits 68 basis points above its February low. Not lower. Higher. And rates are higher now than when the Fed met: Mortgage News Daily’s daily index closed at 6.82% on August 3, up from 6.78% on decision day and within three basis points of its 52-week high. (Mortgage News Daily)

The number that cuts against me, before you find it yourself: rates are still below where they were a year ago, when the 30-year averaged 6.72%. (Freddie Mac) Rates didn’t explode. The 2026 rally reversed, and the direction of travel for five straight months has been up.

The Fed’s own projections flipped from a cut to a hike

Four times a year, FOMC participants publish where they think the federal funds rate should be. Compare two rounds three months apart: the median projection for the end of 2026 was 3.4% in March and 3.8% in June. (Federal Reserve — Summary of Economic Projections, June 17, 2026)

The midpoint of the current range is roughly 3.6%. So in March, the median participant wanted a cut by year-end. By June, the median wanted a hike. Across the eighteen participants, year-end estimates ran from 3.4% all the way to 4.4%.

The minutes put the split in the Committee’s own words: “Many participants indicated that the appropriate level of the federal funds rate would be within or slightly below the current target range at the end of this year. Many other participants, however, assessed that the appropriate level of the federal funds rate would be above the current target range at the end of this year.” (June 2026 FOMC minutes)

What moved them sits in the same document: the median 2026 PCE inflation projection was revised from 2.7% in March to 3.6% in June. (June 2026 SEP) The statement still describes inflation as “elevated relative to the Committee’s 2 percent goal,” against an economy “expanding at a solid pace.” (FOMC statement)

That is not a committee looking for a reason to cut. The next meeting carrying fresh projections is September 15–16 — and in my experience that lands after most of a Florida year’s contracts are already signed.

Meanwhile, Florida kept transacting

In June the state closed 26,036 single-family sales, up 9.3% year over year, at a median of $432,000, up 4.9% — the tenth consecutive month of growth, on 4.5 months of supply. (Florida Realtors, July 17, 2026) Those sales closed into a market where Freddie Mac’s 30-year ran between 6.47% and 6.52% every week of the month. Not 5.5%. Not after a cut.

Here’s the number I’d put in front of anyone who builds. While demand posted its tenth straight month of growth, new supply was being permitted more slowly: Florida authorized 9,943 single-family units by building permit in June against 10,442 a year earlier — down 4.8% — and 56,060 through the first half against 59,631. (U.S. Census Bureau, series FLBP1FH via FRED)

Rising absorption into contracting new supply. That happened without a single rate cut.

The honest counterweight: somebody is paying for that

Builder sentiment is genuinely weak. The NAHB/Wells Fargo index registered 34 in July, its fifteenth straight month below 40 — and 63% of builders used sales incentives while 37% cut prices outright, averaging 6%. (NAHB, July 2026)

The incentive I’d watch is the permanent rate buydown, and it is not free. Lennar reported Q1 2026 sales incentives at roughly 14% of sales price, against a historical average of 4% to 6% — and grew new orders 1% year over year anyway, to 18,515 homes. (Lennar — Form 10-Q, quarter ended February 28, 2026)

Marking this as my view rather than a finding: it works, and it’s a subsidy with a limit, and the limit is whoever’s margin is funding it. The question isn’t who’s offering a buydown — it’s who can fund one for another eighteen months without taking it out of the house. That describes builders selling to financed buyers. It is not a claim that the dynamic has reached the cash tier.

The buyers who never opened a rate sheet

This is the part that matters most to the capital this newsletter serves, and I’ll stay on one reference for all of it — sales above $1 million.

82% of Miami-Dade $1 million-and-up condo sales closed all-cash in 2025, against a national all-price share of roughly 25%. (MIAMI REALTORS®, July 2026) Four in five transactions in that tier of the Miami-Dade condo market never touch a lender. That figure is the condo slice — no matching cash share is published for million-dollar single-family, which was about three-quarters of last quarter’s volume.

And the tier grew while rates climbed. In the second quarter, $1 million-plus transactions across Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, the Treasure Coast and Southwest Florida rose 20.1% to 8,013 single-family sales and 23.5% to 2,590 condos. Miami-Dade is not the center of gravity: Southwest Florida leads on volume — 2,880 single-family, 869 condos — and among individual counties Palm Beach leads at 2,534, against Miami-Dade’s 1,000. (Keyes/Illustrated Luxury Market Report, Q2 2026, via RISMedia) In June, Miami-Dade’s million-dollar sales rose 29.14%, from 374 to 483. (MIAMI REALTORS®)

Two things cut against the easy read of that. The Treasure Coast went the other way — million-dollar single-family sales down 6.5%, condos down 16.9%. And the average luxury condo price rose just 0.3% on that 23.5% volume gain: the same shape the statewide condo tape showed in June — sales up 14% on a median price up 1.7% — now visible at the top of the market too. (Keyes/Illustrated via RISMedia)

So: consistent with the case I made in June’s Florida Luxury Buyer issue, not proof of it. The 82% is a 2025 reading, and one quarter of volume growth in one region is a data point, not a trend.

From the Developer’s Seat

What follows is my opinion, not statute and not data — I want to mark that clearly.

Waiting has stopped being free: “when rates come down” is not a plan, it’s a leveraged bet on one macro variable that three of the people who set it just voted to move the other way. In the financed tier, the surviving edge is a margin thick enough to fund a buydown for another eighteen months without taking it out of the build; in the tier this newsletter is written for, the edge is an end buyer who never needed the financing at all. Disciplined, developer-led, ground-up Florida new construction sold to that second buyer doesn’t need the Fed to cooperate — it needs the basis to be right, the house to be right, and the sponsor still standing in month nineteen. Rising absorption into contracting new supply is the condition that rewards exactly that, and it showed up this year without a single rate cut. That is why Lana’s underwriting was never a rate-cut bet, and why a split Fed is, for us, a non-event.

So I’ll put the question to you: are you underwriting your next Florida decision on a rate assumption, or on a basis that works at 6.5% and at 7.5%? I read every reply.

If you want to see how that shows up in live underwriting — the actual rate assumptions, the actual incentive budget, the actual end-buyer profile — that’s exactly the conversation the Lana Investor Memo is built for.

→ Request access at coastal-living-collection.com (accredited investors only).

And if you know someone who’s been sitting on a Florida decision waiting for a cut, forward this to them. That’s the person this issue was written for.

Until next week,
Luis

Tag: New construction

The Fed Held Rates Last Week — and Three Officials Voted to Raise Them. Not One Voted to Cut.